The Used-Book Dealer

It all began some time before my release from Kolyma. I had been transferred from night into day – clearly a promotion, a confirmation, a success along the dangerous path to salvation of an orderly recruited from among the patients. I never noticed who took my place, for in those days I lacked the strength necessary for curiosity and I hoarded my movements – spiritual and physical. I’d accomplished resurrections before, and I knew how dearly one paid for unnecessary curiosity.

In a nocturnal half-sleep and out of the corner of my eye, however, I saw a pale dirty face grown over with reddish bristles, cavernous eyes – eyes whose color I couldn’t remember – and hooked frostbitten fingers clutching the handle of the smoky kettle. The barracks’ hospital night was so dark and thick that the flame of the kerosene lantern, wavering and flickering as if in the wind, was not enough to light up the corridor, the ceiling, the wall, the door, the floor. The light ripped from the darkness only a piece of the night: a corner of the bedside table and the pale face bent over it. The new man on duty was dressed in the same gown that I used to wear. It was a dirty, torn gown – an ordinary gown intended for the patients. During the day this filthy garment hung in the hospital ward and at night was donned over the quilted jacket of the orderly on duty, who was always chosen from among the patients. The flannel was so extraordinarily thin it was transparent, but nevertheless it didn’t tear. Perhaps the patients made no abrupt movements for fear that the gown would disintegrate. Or perhaps they were unable to.

The semicircle of light swayed back and forth, wavered, reached out in sudden movements. It seemed that the cold and not the wind swung the light above the night table of the orderly on duty. It was not the wind, but the cold itself that moved the light. Within the circle of light swung a face twisted with hunger, and hooked fingers searched the kettle’s bottom for something no spoon could catch. Even frostbitten, the fingers were more reliable than a spoon; at once I understood the essence of the movement, the language of gesture.

There was no reason for me to know all this; I was only the day orderly.

But a few days later, fate was unexpectedly prodded by a sudden and hurried departure in the back of a jolting truck. The vehicle crawled south toward Magadan along the bed of a nameless river that served as a winter road through the taiga. In the back of the truck two human beings were repeatedly tossed upward and dropped back on to the floor with a wooden thud as if they were logs. The guard was sitting in the cab, and I couldn’t tell if I was being struck by a piece of wood or a man. At one of the feeding stops my neighbor’s greedy chomping struck me as familiar, and I recognized the hooked fingers and the pale dirty face.

We didn’t speak to each other; each feared he might frighten off his happiness, his convict joy. The truck hurried on into the next day, and the road came to an end.

We had both been selected by the camp to take paramedic courses. Magadan, the hospital, and the courses were cloaked in fog, a white Kolyma fog. Were there markers, road markers? Would they accept political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code? Only those who came under Point 10. And how about my neighbor in the rear of the truck? He too was ASA – anti-Soviet agitation. That was considered the same as Point 10.

There was an examination on the Russian language. A dictation. The grades were posted the same day. I got an ‘A’. After that came a written examination on mathematics, and I received another ‘A’. It was taken for granted that future students were not required to know the fine points of the Soviet Constitution… I lay on the bunk, dirty and still literally lousy. The job of orderly didn’t destroy lice. But perhaps it only seemed that way to me; lice infestation is one of the camp neuroses. I didn’t have lice any more, but I still couldn’t force myself to get used to the thought or, rather, to the feeling that the lice were gone. I had experienced that feeling two or three times. As for the ‘constitution’ or political economics, such things were no more intended for us than was the luxurious Astoria Hotel. In Butyr Prison the guard on duty in our cell block shouted at me: ‘Why do you keep asking about the Constitution? Your Constitution is the Criminal Code!’ And he was right. Yes, the Criminal Code was our constitution. That was a long time ago. A thousand years. The fourth subject was chemistry. My grade was ‘C’.

Oh, how those convict students strove for knowledge when the stakes of the game were life! How former professors of medicine strove to beat their life-saving knowledge into the heads of ignoramuses and idiots. From the storekeeper Silaikin down to the Tartar writer Min-Shabay, none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in medicine.

Twisting his thin lips in a sneer, the surgeon asked:

‘Who invented penicillin?’

‘Fleming!’ The answer was given not by me, but by my neighbor from the district hospital. His red bristles were shaven off, and there remained only an unhealthy pale puffiness in the cheeks. (He had gorged himself on soup, I immediately realized.)

I was amazed at the red-headed student’s knowledge. The surgeon sized up the triumphant ‘Fleming’. Who are you, night orderly? Who? Who were you before prison?

‘I’m a captain. A captain of the engineering troops. At the beginning of the war I was chief of the fortified area on Dicson Island. We had to put up fortifications in a hurry. In the fall of ’41 when the morning fog broke we saw the German raider Graf Spee in the bay. The raider shot up all our fortifications point-blank. And left. And I got ten years. “If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairy tale.” ’

All the students studied through the night, passionately soaking up knowledge with all the appetite of men condemned to death but suddenly given the chance of a reprieve.

After a meeting with the higher-ups, however, Fleming’s spirits lifted and he brought a novel to the barracks, where everyone else was studying. As he finished off some boiled fish, the remnants of someone else’s feast, he carelessly leafed through the book.

Catching my ironic smile, Fleming said:

‘What’s the difference? We’ve been studying for three months now, and anyone who’s lasted this long will finish and get his certificate. Why should I go crazy studying? You have to know how to look at things.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to learn to treat people. I want to learn a real skill.’

‘Knowing how to live is a real skill.’

It was then that I learned that Fleming’s claim to having been a captain was only a mask, another mask on that pale prison face. The rank of captain was real; the bit about the engineering troops was an invention. Fleming had been in the NKVD – the secret police – with the rank of captain. Information on his past had been accumulating drop by drop for several years. A drop was a measure of time, something like a water clock. This drop fell on the bare skull of a person being interrogated; such was the water clock of the Leningrad prisons of the thirties. Sand clocks measured the time allotted for exercise. Water clocks measured the time of confession, the period of investigation. Clocks of sand drained with fleeting speed; water clocks were tormentingly slow. Water clocks didn’t count or measure minutes; they measured the human soul, the will, destroying it drop by drop, eroding it just as water erodes a rock. This piece of folklore about investigations was very popular in the thirties and even in the twenties.

Captain Fleming’s words were gathered drop by drop, and the treasure turned out to be priceless. Fleming himself considered it priceless. It could not have been otherwise, and I remember our conversations very clearly.

‘Do you know the greatest secret of our time?’

‘What?’

‘The trials of the thirties. You know how they prepared them? I was in Leningrad at the time. I worked with Zakovsky. The preparation of the trials was all chemistry, medicine, pharmacology. They had more will-suppressants than you could shake a stick at. You don’t think that if such suppressants exist, they wouldn’t use them? The Geneva Agreement or something like that…

‘It would have been too human to possess chemical will-suppressants and not use them on the “internal front”. This and only this is the secret of the trials of the thirties, the open trials, open to foreign correspondents and to any Feucht-wanger. There were no “doubles” in those trials. The secret of the trials was the secret of pharmacology…’

I lay on the short uncomfortable bunk in the empty student barracks which was shot through with rays of sunshine and listened to these admissions.

‘There were experiments earlier – in the sabotage trials, for example. That comic trial of Ramzin touches on pharmacology very slightly.’

Fleming’s story seeped through drop by drop, or was it his own blood that fell on my bare memory? What sort of drops were these – blood, tears, or ink? They weren’t ink, and they weren’t tears.

‘Of course, there are instances when medicine is powerless. Or sometimes the solutions aren’t prepared properly. There were rules to double-check everything.’

‘Where are those doctors now?’

‘Who knows? On the moon probably…’

The investigator has all the latest scientific discoveries and technology in his arsenal, the latest in pharmacology.

‘It wasn’t cabinet “A” – toxic or poisonous – and not cabinet “B” – strong effect…’ It turns out that the Latin word ‘hero’ is translated in Russian as ‘having a strong effect’. And where were Captain Fleming’s medications kept? In cabinet ‘C’, the crime cabinet or in cabinet ‘M’ – for magic?

A person who had access to cabinet ‘C’, cabinet ‘M’, and the most advanced scientific discoveries had to take a course for hospital orderlies to learn that man has one liver, that the liver is not a paired organ. He learned about blood circulation three hundred years after Harvey.

The secret was kept in laboratories, in underground offices, in stinking cages where the animals smelled like convicts in the Magadan transit prison in ’38. In comparison with this transit prison, Butyr was a model of surgical immaculateness and smelled more like an operating-room than an animal’s cage.

All scientific and technological discoveries are checked first of all for any military significance, even to the extent of speculating on their possible future military uses. And only that which has been sifted through by the generals and found to have no relevance to war is given over for the common use.

Medicine, chemistry, pharmacology have long since been placed under military control. Throughout the world, institutes for the study of the brain have always accumulated the results of experiments, observations. Borgia’s poisons were always a weapon of Realpolitik. The twentieth century brought with it an extraordinary tide of pharmacological and chemical preparations for the control of the psyche.

But if it is possible to obliterate fear with medicine, the opposite is true a thousand times – it is possible to suppress the human will by injections, by pure pharmacology and chemistry without making use of any ‘physical’ methods such as breaking ribs and knocking out teeth, stubbing out cigarettes on the body of the person under investigation, or trampling him with the heels of boots.

These two schools of investigation were known as physics and chemistry. The physicists regarded purely physical persuasion as the cornerstone of their building and viewed beatings as a means of revealing the moral foundations of the world. Once revealed, how base and worthless were the depths of human essence! Beatings could achieve any testimony. Under the threat of a club, inventors made scientific discoveries, wrote verse and novels. The fear of beating and the stomach’s scale for measuring its ‘ration’ worked miracles.

Beating is a sufficiently weighty and effective psychological weapon.

Many useful results were produced by the famous and ubiquitous ‘conveyor’ in which the investigators alternated without giving the arrested person a chance to sleep. After seventeen days without sleep a man loses his sanity. Has this scientific observation been made in the offices of political investigators?

But neither did the chemical school retreat.

Physics could guarantee material for ‘Special Councils’ and all sorts of ‘troikas’ where a triumvirate of judges would make their decisions behind closed doors. The School of Physical Inducement, however, could not be applied in open trials. The School of Physical Inducement (I believe that’s the term used by Stanislavsky) could not publicly present its theater of blood, could not have prepared the ‘open trials’ that made all mankind tremble. The preparation of such spectacles was within the realm of competency of the chemists.

Twenty years after these conversations with Fleming I include in this story lines taken from a newspaper article:

Through the application of certain psychopharmacological agents it is possible, for example, to remove a human being’s sense of fear for a limited time. Of particular importance is the fact that the clarity of his consciousness is not in the least disturbed in the process.

Later even more unexpected facts come to light. Persons whose ‘B phases’ of dream were suppressed for a long period of time – in the given instance for seventeen nights in a row – began to experience various disturbances in their psychic condition and conduct.

What is this? Fragments of testimony of some former NKVD officer during the trial of the judges? A letter from Vyshinsky or Riumin before their deaths? No, these are paragraphs taken from a scientific article written by a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But all this – and a hundred times more – was learned, tried, and applied in the thirties in the preparation of the ‘open trials’!

Pharmacology was not the only weapon in the investigator’s arsenal of those years. Fleming mentioned a name that I knew well.

Ornaldo!

Of course! Ornaldo was a famous hypnotist who appeared frequently in the twenties in Moscow circuses, and not only in Moscow.

Ornaldo’s speciality was mass hypnosis. Books on hypnosis are illustrated with photographs of his famous tours. ‘Ornaldo’, of course, was a pseudonym. His real name was M. A. Smirnov, and he was a Moscow doctor. There were posters pasted all the way around special drums used for theatrical advertisements. Paolo-Svishev had a photograph hanging in the window on Stoleshnikov Lane. It was an enormous photograph of human eyes with the inscription ‘The Eyes of Ornaldo’. Even now I remember those eyes and the emotional confusion that I experienced whenever I heard or saw Ornaldo’s circus act. There are photographs of Ornaldo’s performances taken in 1929 in Baku. Then he left the stage.

‘Beginning in the middle of the thirties Ornaldo was in the secret employment of the NKVD.’

The shiver of a revealed secret ran down my back.

Fleming would frequently, and for no special reason, praise Leningrad. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he admitted he wasn’t a native Leningrader. In fact, he had been recruited from the provinces by the aesthetes of the NKVD in the twenties as their worthy replacement. They grafted on to him tastes much broader than those provided by an ordinary school education. Not just Turgenev and Nekrasev, but Bal-mont and Sologub, not just Pushkin, but Gumilyov as well:

‘ “And you, watchdogs of the king, pirates guarding gold in the dark port…” I’m not quoting the line incorrectly, am I?’

‘No, that’s right.’

‘I can’t remember the rest. Am I a watchdog of the king? Of the state?’

And smiling – both to himself and his past – he told with reverence how he had touched the file of the executed poet Gumilyov, calling it the affair of lycée pupils. It was as if a Pushkinist were telling how he had held the goose quill pen with which Pushkin wrote Poltava. It was just as if he had touched the Stone of Kaaba, such was the bliss, the purification in every feature of his face. I couldn’t help but think that this too was a way of being introduced to poetry, an amazing, extremely rare manner of introduction in the office of the criminal investigator. Of course the moral values of poetry are not transmitted in the process.

‘When reading books I would first of all turn to the notes, the comments. Man is a creature of notes and comments.’

‘How about the text?’

‘Not always. There is always time for that.’

Obscene as this may sound, Fleming and his co-workers could partake of culture only in their work as investigators. Their familiarity with persons of literary and social circles was distorted but nevertheless real and genuine in a sense, not concealed behind a thousand masks.

The chief informer on the artistic intelligentsia of those years was Major General Ignatiev. To hear the name of this former czarist diplomat and well-known memoirist was surprising only at first. A steady, thoughtful, and qualified author of all sorts of ‘memoranda’ and surveys of writers’ lives, he had served fifty years in the ranks. Forty of those years were spent in the Soviet spy network.

‘I’d already read the book Fifty Years in the Ranks, and was familiar with his surveys when they introduced me to him. Or him to me,’ Fleming said thoughtfully. ‘Not a bad book, Fifty Years in the Ranks.’

Fleming didn’t care much for newspapers, news, or radio programs. International events scarcely interested him. His emotional life was dominated by a deep resentment for that dark power that had promised the high-school boy he would fathom boundless depths, that had carried him to such heights and that had now shamelessly cast him into the abyss.

Fleming’s introduction to culture was peculiar – some brief courses and some excursions to the Hermitage. The boy grew into an investigator-aesthete who was shocked by the crude force that was rushing into the ‘organs of justice’ in the thirties. His type was swept away and destroyed by the ‘new wave’ that placed its faith in crude force and despised not only psychological refinements, but even the ‘conveyor’ and the method of not allowing the prisoner to sit down until he confessed. The new wave simply had no patience for any scientific calculations or lofty psychology. It was easier to get results with simple beatings. The slow aesthetes ended up on the moon. It was sheer chance that Fleming remained alive. The new wave couldn’t wait.

The hungry gleam in Fleming’s eyes faded, and the professional observer again made his voice heard.

‘You know, I was watching you during the pre-operative conference. You had something on your mind.’

‘I just want to remember everything, remember it and describe it.’

Some images swayed in Fleming’s already relaxed and calmed brain.

*

In the Magadan psychological ward where Fleming had worked there was an enormous Latvian. Every time the giant sat down to eat, Fleming would sit opposite him, unable to restrain his ecstasy at the sight of such a mountain of food.

Fleming never parted with his pot, the same pot which he had brought from the north. It was a talisman, a Kolyma talisman.

The criminal element in the psychological ward caught a cat, killed it, cooked it, and gave Fleming a portion as the traditional Kolyma tribute since he was the orderly on duty. Fleming ate the meat and kept silent about the cat. The cat was a pet in the surgical ward.

The students were afraid of Fleming. But whom didn’t the students fear? In the hospital Fleming was already working as an orderly, a staff medic. Everyone feared and hated him, sensing in him not only an employee of the secret police but also the master of some unusually important, terrible secret.

The antipathy grew, and the plot thickened after Fleming made a sudden trip to meet with a young Spanish woman. She was a real Spaniard, the daughter of one of the members of the government of the Republic of Spain. She’d been a spy, got involved in a web of provocations, was sentenced and sent to Kolyma to die. It turned out, however, that Fleming was not forgotten by his old and distant friends, his former colleagues. He had to learn something from the woman, to confirm something. But the patient couldn’t wait. She had recovered and Was being sent to a women’s mine. Interrupting his work in the hospital, Fleming suddenly traveled to the mine to meet the woman. He spent two days on the seven-hundred-kilometer road with its incessant flow of vehicles and a check-point every kilometer. Fleming was lucky, and he returned from the meeting safe and sound. The event could have taken place in a novel, a feat of camp love. Alas, Fleming didn’t travel or accomplish any feats for the sake of love. His was a passion much stronger than love, the highest passion of all, and it would carry Fleming safely past all the camp checkpoints.

Fleming frequently recalled the thirties and the sudden flood of murders and suicides. There was the death of the family of Savinkov, the former revolutionary and terrorist. The son was shot, and the family – the wife, two children, and the wife’s mother – did not wish to leave Leningrad. All wrote letters and left them for each other before killing themselves, and Fleming’s memory preserved lines of a note from one of the children: ‘Grandma, we’re going to die soon…’

The sentence Fleming had received in connection with the NKVD affair ended in 1950, but he didn’t return to Leningrad. He didn’t receive permission. His wife, who had retained their room all those years, came to Magadan from Leningrad, wasn’t able to make any living arrangements, and went back. Fleming returned to Leningrad just before the Twentieth Party Congress, to the same room he’d lived in before his disaster.

He had to do a lot of running around to get his pension of 1,400 old-style rubles that he was due for his years of service. His camp medical courses notwithstanding, he was not allowed to return to his old speciality as an expert on pharmacology. It turned out that all the former employees, all the veterans of these affairs, all the aesthetes who were still alive, had long since been put out to pasture – all of them, right down to the last courier.

Fleming got a job as a book selector in a second-hand bookstore on Liteiny Prospect. Although his relationship and contact with the Russian intelligentsia was such a peculiar one, he considered himself to be of its bone and flesh. To the end he refused to separate his fate from that of the Russian intelligentsia, feeling, perhaps, that only contact with books could help him preserve his skills, if only he could succeed in living till better times.

In the nineteenth century a captain in the ‘engineering troops’ would have taken vows and retreated to a monastery, as did the Russian writer Konstantin Leontiev. But the dangerous and lofty world of books was tinted with fanaticism for Fleming, and like any other infatuation with books, it served the function of a moral purge. The former admirer of Gumilyov and expert on both Gumilyov’s fate and his comments on verse could not become a night-watchman. Perhaps use his new profession of hospital orderly? No, better to be a used-book dealer.

‘I’m constantly running around, filling out forms. Bring us some rum,’ Fleming said, turning to the waitress.

‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.

‘How unfortunate, how inconvenient it is that you don’t drink. Katya, he doesn’t drink! You understand? I’m constantly working at it. I’ll return to my old job.’

‘If you go back’ Katya said with her blue lips, ‘I’ll hang myself or drown myself the very next day!’

‘I’m just kidding. I’m always kidding… I’m constantly presenting applications, running around the courts, traveling to Moscow. After all, they took me back in the party. But you know how?’

A wad of rumpled paper emerged from Fleming’s jacket pocket.

‘Read this. This is Drabkina’s testimony. She was a prisoner in my camp in Igarka. Later she published her memoirs under the title Black Toast.’

Quickly I read through the woman’s extensive testimony:

‘As head of the camp he treated the prisoners well and for this reason was soon arrested and convicted…’

I leafed through the dirty, sticky testimony of Drabkina which had passed through the careless fingers of government officials.

Bending down to my ear, his breath reeking of rum, Fleming explained hoarsely that he had been a ‘human being’ in camp, even Drabkina confirmed that.

‘Do you really need all this?’

‘I need it. It fills my life. Who knows, maybe I’ll pull it off. How about a drink?’

‘I don’t drink.’

‘For years of service. But that’s not what I need…’

‘Stop it, or I’ll hang myself!’ Katya shouted.

‘She’s got a heart condition,’ Fleming explained.

‘Take yourself in hand. Write. You have a good style. I know that from your letters. And a story or a novel is, after all, a confidential letter.’

‘No, I’m not a writer. I’m going to keep on working at what I started…’

And slobbering in my ear, he whispered something I could make neither head nor tail of, that supposedly there never was any Kolyma and that he himself had spent seventeen days on the ‘conveyor’ in ’37 and that his mind was not what it used to be.

‘They’re publishing a lot of memoirs now. For example, they just published Yakubovich’s In the World of Outcasts, his memoirs about his years in a czarist penal farm. Let them publish that stuff.’

‘Have you written any memoirs?’

‘No, but there is a book I want to recommend for publication. You know which one? I went to the Lenin Publishing House, but they told me to mind my own business…’

‘What book?’

‘The notes of Sanson, the Paris executioner. Now those are memoirs!’

‘The Parisian executioner?’

‘Yes. Sanson guillotined Charlotte Corday and slapped her cheeks, and the cheeks of the severed head blushed. One other thing: they used to give parties that they called the Victims’ Ball. Do we have that kind of ball?’

‘The Victims’ Ball had nothing to do with the Thermidor Period; it was part of the Post-Thermidor Period. Sanson’s notes are a forgery.’

‘What’s the difference if they’re a forgery or not? Either there was such a book or there wasn’t. Let’s have some rum. I’ve tried a lot of drinks in my time, but there’s nothing like rum. Rum. Jamaican rum.’

Fleming’s wife prepared dinner – mountains of greasy food that was almost instantly devoured by the voracious Fleming. An insatiable gluttony remained for ever a part of Fleming, just as thousands of other former convicts retained their psychic traumas for the rest of their lives.

The conversation somehow broke off in the early city twilight. I could hear next to me the familiar Kolyma chomping and slurping. I thought of life’s strength – hidden in a healthy stomach and bowels that were capable of digesting large quantities. That had been Fleming’s defensive reflex against Kolyma – an omnivorous greed. A lack of spiritual fastidiousness acquired behind the desk of a political investigator had also served to prepare him and cushion the shock of his Kolyma fall. As he fell, he perceived no abyss, for he had known all this even earlier and the knowledge saved him by weakening his moral torments, if such torments had even existed. Fleming experienced no additional spiritual traumas; he witnessed the worst and indifferently watched those next to him perish. Prepared to struggle only for his own life, he saved that life, but in his soul there remained a dark footprint that had to be obliterated, purged with penitence. His penitence was a slip of the tongue, a half-hint, a conversation aloud with himself – without regret or condemnation. ‘The cards just didn’t fall my way.’ Nevertheless Fleming’s story was an act of penitence.

‘You see this?’ he asked me.

‘Your party membership card?’

‘Right. It’s brand new! But it wasn’t simple, not at all simple. Six months ago the District Party Committee examined the question of taking me back into the party. They all sat around, read the materials. The secretary of the committee, a Chuvash, announced the decision in a flat way, almost rudely:

‘ “Well, it’s a clear situation. Write up a resolution: reinstatement with an interruption in membership.”

‘It was as if they threw hot coals on me: “with an interruption in membership.” My first thought was that if I didn’t immediately declare I was in disagreement with the resolution, they’d always ask afterward why I was silent when my case was being examined. I mean, that’s why you’re called in, so you can speak your piece in time, tell them… I raised my hand.

‘ “Whad’ya want?” That same rudeness.

‘I said: “I disagree with the resolution. I won’t be able to get a job anywhere without being asked to explain the interruption.”

‘ “You’re a quick one,” the first secretary of the Party District Committee said. “You’re so pushy because you’re not hurting for money. How much is your pension?”

‘He was right, but I interrupted him and said that I asked for total reinstatement with no interruption in membership.

‘And he said: “Why are you pushing and getting all worked up? You’re in blood up to your elbows!”

‘There was a roaring in my head. “How about you,” I said. “Aren’t your hands in blood?”

‘The first secretary said: “This meeting is cancelled.”

‘ “And back then, in ’37,” I said, “didn’t you bloody your hands then?”

‘The first secretary said: “Enough of this running off at the mouth. We can vote again. Get out of here.”

‘I went out into the corridor and they brought me the resolution: “reinstatement in the party denied.”

‘I ran around Moscow like a crazy man, filling out forms, writing letters. The resolution was cancelled. But the original formulation stayed: “reinstatement with interruption of membership.”

‘The person who reported my situation at the Party Control Commission said I should have kept my mouth shut at the District Committee Meeting. I’m still working at it, filling out forms, going to Moscow, filing legal suits. Have a drink.’

‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.

‘This isn’t rum, it’s cognac. Five-star cognac! For you.’

‘Take the bottle away.’

‘I’ll do just that, carry it away, take it with me. You won’t be offended?’

‘Not in the least.’

A year after this Leningrad supper I received a last letter from the used-book dealer: ‘My wife died suddenly while I was away from Leningrad. I arrived six months later and saw her grave and a snapshot of her in the coffin. Don’t condemn me for my weakness; I have all my wits about me, but I can’t get anything done. I live as if in a dream and have lost all interest in life. I know this will pass, but I need time. What did she see in her life? Dragged herself from one prison to another with packages and legal certificates. Social contempt, the trip to be with me in Magadan, a life of poverty, and now this – the end. Forgive me, I’ll write more later. Yes, I’m in good health, but is the society I live in healthy? All the best.’


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