Authors: Mikhail Elizarov
In a frenzy I got up, switched on the light and opened the hatch. I took out the bedpan and pissed like a human being. And I tipped my entire privy into it as well. I couldn’t give a damn what the old women would think when they saw the three-day heap.
I dragged the tray out of the niche and greedily gulped down the soup. The main course was schnitzel with mashed potatoes— I thought I had never tasted anything more delicious in my life. And that was the end of my hunger strike. I put the plates, licked completely clean, back into the dumb waiter. The mechanism’s gear wheels squeaked and the echo of the shaft cruelly distorted the mechanical noise into croaking laughter.
I made my second, and last, attempt a month later. I decided to commit suicide again—this time by slashing my wrists. The “blood” was made of water, ground brick and a portion of strawberry jam. I mixed the ingredients together in a glass.
In the morning I sent a letter and stood in front of the door— my jailers had to see my Roman hara-kiri. I crushed a light bulb under the sole of my shoe, picked up an extremely thin petal of glass off the floor and ran it across my veins (not even a scratch) and turned away quickly. I had filled my mouth in advance with the brick-and-jam ersatz, and I spat it out, then showed my wrists covered in “blood” to the peephole and sat down at the desk to die—with my back to the door. I kept adding small amounts of blood from the glass, so that it flowed off the desk in a thin, convincing trickle. I thought it was a realistic picture.
It took great self-restraint to show the strength gradually draining out of me, to melt way slowly, like a snowman. I laid my cheek on an exercise book and froze. And then the mental count began: one, two, three, four, five… and on up to sixty—a minute. Sixty minutes—an hour. With every hour that passed I persuaded myself to remain patient and be a little more dead… The night passed. The dumb waiter woke up as if nothing had happened. But the old scumbags hadn’t even thought of coming! Even if they had seen through my amusing hunger strike, they had no right to have any doubts about veins! I really had almost died!
The truth was hard. No one was watching me. Or if they were, they couldn’t give a rotten damn for my ignominious dramatic efforts. In a fit of fury I hammered the chair to pieces against
the door, but then I put it back together again. From that day on I knew for certain that if I croaked, the bunker would simply be loaded with a new “grandson”.
I discovered unexpected positive aspects to this unpleasant discovery. Round-the-clock acting was terribly exhausting. I was finally able to relax. I wasn’t crushed by the sense of isolation that suddenly flooded over me. I ate regularly, rubbed myself down with alcohol, combed my hair, shaved and did my exercises. After a month of shoddy acting my shoulders were cramped into a proud bearing. I suffered fits of terror less and less often. An inexperienced diver feels the discomfort of immersion in his chest for the first few seconds. But he only has to get past that urge to breathe in—and there’s still a long way to go to genuine asphyxiation…
I thought up something to do to occupy my mind. After all, it was no accident that they had provided me with exercise books and a bundle of ballpoint pens.
In my long-ago childhood I had imitated the example of the Young Communists of the Sixties, who sent time capsules with greetings to themselves into the Communist future, by writing letters to myself. Sometimes I wrote and sealed the envelope, agreeing with myself that I would open it in ten years’ time. That was how I learned to my surprise that a person’s handwriting ages together with him. Often I cut into the soft, bluish bark of a poplar, imagining that some time, years later, when I grew up, I would touch those scars on the tree and remember the boy in a knitted blue jacket and a woolly “cockerel” cap scraping at the trunk with his key, and that would be a greeting sent across the years.
Working with a view of the Kremlin was absorbing; I didn’t feel at all like crazed Nestor, scribbling his
Tale of Bygone Years
. I wrote, and in the pauses I turned off the lamp and rested in the dark. The pitch darkness transformed the bunker into a black box and I was the recording mechanism inside, which would one day be found
and read. The grey exercise book came to an end and I started on a brown one…
My first despondent leisure hours as a chronicler were enlivened by the Book of Strength (
The Proletarian Way
). The storyline was this. It is five years since the blast of war fell silent. The country is rebuilding its economy on a peaceful basis. During the war years the plan was fulfilled by superhuman effort and extra-long work shifts. The new life requires not merely enthusiasm but also innovative thinking. Many difficulties arise on this path, including the conservatism of certain enterprise managers. A difficult situation has arisen at the Proletarian Mine. The engineer Solovyev, a former front-line soldier, is at the centre of the plot. He tries to break down the established ways of doing things in order to mechanize work at the coalface. Solovyev is opposed by Basyuk, the head of the mine, who is obsessed with the stereotypes of wartime—to fulfil the plan at any price, even by last-minute storming tactics. Basyuk is not capable of understanding that the grandiose prospects of peacetime construction require different tempos and levels of productivity that cannot be achieved with outmoded equipment. The failure to modernize safety systems results in an accident. Basyuk tries to shift all the blame for what has happened onto Solovyev. It takes all the determination, grit and candour of such seasoned war veterans as the Party organizer Chistyakov and the coalface workers’ foreman Lichko to ensure that the genuine culprit receives his deserved punishment…
After reading the Book of Strength I tried to break down the door; a pointless and painful endeavour, the excess of unnatural power almost left me a cripple. I didn’t notice that I had given myself a hernia lifting the extremely heavy oak desk that I used to ram the unyielding armour plate. The door didn’t budge, but the oak started to crumble. The effect of the Book wore off, and I was racked by fierce pains in my stomach and back. It was no wonder—the Book activated the secret reserves of physical strength of the individual
reader. At that moment my maximum strength was limited by the constraints of my body, and even a grenade launcher wouldn’t have blown that door in.
I managed, at the cost of skinning my fingers, to bend the hatch cover of the dumb waiter slightly, but I only convinced myself that there was no escape through the shaft—a block of steel with practically no gaps closed it off at the top.
I had clearly damaged the hermetic seal of the bent hatch cover, because sounds from the invisible kitchen started reaching the bunker: radio-station jingles, music, the voices of the cooks, the clatter of kitchenware in sinks.
Always at the same time, between breakfast and lunch, a retro music station played Soviet variety music. The programme lasted for about half an hour, and I allowed myself the pleasure of stopping work and listening to Pakhmutov, Krylatov or Frenkel.
I made yet another attempt to communicate by letter, sending two brief blackmailing epistles: I threatened to destroy the Book of Strength. But they sent me the Book of Power (
Fly On, Happiness
). This short novel in just over two hundred pages was a paean of praise to the heroism of the virgin-soil pioneers. At the summons of the Party, young people have come from every corner of the Union to assimilate previously uncultivated lands. Yevgeny Lubentsov has only recently graduated from an agricultural academy and has been invited to stay on for postgraduate study. The prospects before him are tempting: to finish his Ph.D. and to live in the big city. However, in the spirit of Pavel Korchagin, Lubentsov decides to go to the virgin lands as an agronomist. He deliberately chooses a backward Machine Tractor Station. Lubentsov has to demonstrate great organizational talent in order to get the station working properly. He gradually learns to understand people. At home he was in love with Elina Zaslavskaya, an attractive-looking girl whom he regarded as talented and high-minded. But on the virgin lands he comes to know the value of collectivism and comradeship, and
this helps him to see through Elina’s essentially bourgeois nature. For her, heroic, noble labour in the name of the people and the country is nothing but romantic nonsense. Lubentsov realizes that Elina cannot remain his friend and companion for the rest of his life. He finds a new love in the ploughwoman Masha Fadeyeva…
From the artistic point of view the book was a lot weaker than
The Proletarian Way
. The negative characters were written too grotesquely, like caricatures in the magazine
Krokodil
. The text was indelibly stained with the newspaper ink of populistic leading articles: “They joyfully appreciated the grandeur and beauty of nature, its wisdom and generosity, and spared no efforts to set the golden ears of wheat waving above the empty land.”
Unfortunately there was no one for me to influence with my Power. No one saw the majestic expressions of my face; no one heeded the imperious modulations of my voice. I hurled my lightning-bolt glances at the walls, the door and the dumb waiter in vain.
The third Book they sent was one I was already familiar with—the Book of Meaning, with its neat insert. The fourth was the Book of Joy (
Narva
), a military novel about anti-aircraft gunners. Leaving aside the short lyrical passages with descriptions of the lives of the main characters and several pastoral sections at the beginning of the novella, the plot unfolds in the space of a few heroic days. February 1943. An anti-aircraft and machine-gun platoon from a ski battalion has dug in on the western bank of the Narva River. Supported by tanks, Hitler’s forces attack the positions of the Soviet warriors. The defence is headed by Lieutenant Golubnichy. The main forces of the battalion wage stubborn battle against the enemy’s tanks and infantry along a small bridgehead on the other side of the river. It is impossible to get the heavy gun across from the eastern bank to the western one—the ice on the Narva is broken. By the end of the day there are only three members of the machine-gun formation remaining—Golubnichy and two privates, Martynenko and Tishin. In the evening Lance-Corporal
Sklyarov manages to get through to them and deliver ammunition. After a powerful mortar attack the German forces advance again. Martynenko is killed. Golubnichy and Sklyarov, both wounded, load the ammunition belts and Tishin runs from one machine gun to another so that the enemy won’t guess that there is only one warrior left unwounded at the position. When the Fascists break in, Golubnichy sends a signal rocket to call down the fire of our artillery on himself. The flames of explosions rage above the position and the Hitlerites flee in panic. Units from a Guards’ rifle division arrive and make a forced crossing of the Narva…
Joy in its pure form had no admixture of merriment and jocularity. There was only exultation and jubilation of the spirit. All the bitterer was the shift of mood when the feeling of rapture was replaced by a withdrawal full of hopeless despair.
I had no doubt that the pragmatic Gorn had the role of a sacrificial “reader” in mind for me right from the beginning. How bitterly I regretted that I had not been killed at the village soviet together with the other Shironinites. Someone who is destined to be hanged should pray to his rope and make confession to his piece of soap, because if he decides to drown instead, it will be torment. I would gladly have exchanged the job of running round in closed circles for a glorious and rapid death from a hook or an axe.
For many days I used the Book of Joy like vodka, to numb my fear, immersing myself twice a day in an iridescent state of ecstasy. I tried to time the reading so the final pages would coincide with the retro music programme. That way the effect of the Book lasted for almost twice as long.
As a result of this binge reading I even had hallucinations a few times. I heard footsteps outside the door, heard the bolt opening with a rusty screech, or I heard the late Margarita Tikhonovna’s voice in the shaft of the dumb waiter, discussing my lunch menu
with someone. She was trying to persuade them that “Alyosha has hated chicken since he was little”.
I realized that I was being hoodwinked by auditory hallucinations, but even so I shouted to her and asked her to get me out of the bunker. For lunch I was given macaroni and a pimply chicken leg…
This went on until they sent the Book of Endurance. The anaesthetized indifference to everything that this Book induced suited me far better: unlike Joy, Endurance left almost no fleshly hangover.
I deliberately read the Book of Fury (
By Labour’s Roads
) without observing the Conditions. I didn’t want to reduce myself to the state of a berserk. I had no one to fight and, in addition, I was afraid of damaging myself in my blind fury.
I can say in brief that the Book told the story of a working-class dynasty, the Shapovalovs, and how a small factory for repairing agricultural equipment grew into a metallurgical combine with automated production lines, and the village of Vysoky grew into a city.
I waited for the seventh and final Book, the Book of Memory. I had no doubt that it would appear. The dumb waiter had turned from a provider of food into an instrument of exquisite torture. My heart was in my mouth every time I opened the cover. After all this exhausting agitation I couldn’t eat a bite; I even suffered from nervous vomiting. Only the artificial endurance saved me.
I didn’t need to wonder exactly how the old women would force me to start reading the Books. The mechanism of compulsion was obvious. When the dumb waiter fell silent, Alexei Vyazintsev would be faced with a fairly simple choice: starve to death or become the talisman of the country. I feverishly stuffed the drawers of the desk with bread.
Of course I was aware that no matter how much I stored up, the rusks would run out. There was no escaping the fate of the
reader and curator; I could only drag out the time, hoping that something unimaginable might happen “on the off chance”. What if there really were only one copy of the Book of Strength after all? What if Gorn and the fourteen elders had been weakened and died long ago? That meant that sooner or later the leadership would change up above. The new female ataman would want to recover the invaluable Book from the basement. They would have to reach an agreement with me, and I would haggle…