The Big Green Tent

MILYUTIN PARK

No one knows the secret of irresistible attraction, the law that draws a particular man and a particular woman together. Ecclesiastes, at any rate, didn’t know. Medieval legend tries to account for it in the guise of a love potion. Poison, in other words. No doubt the same poison in which the omnipotent Eros soaked his operatic arrows. Modern people find the answer in hormones serving the instinct to preserve the species. Clearly, between this pragmatic goal and platonic love there is a significant gap, even a cognitive dissonance, as a more contemporary idiom might have it. The earnest task of continuing the species takes refuge in all kinds of ritual embellishment—orange blossoms, priests, seals graced with eagles, and so forth, right down to the bloody sheet hung out in the courtyard for public inspection. This aspect of love is more or less straightforward.

But where does that leave friendship? Not a single major instinct supports it. All the philosophers (men, of course—before Piama Gaidenko there were no women philosophers, unless you count the legendary Hypatia) considered friendship to be at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of values. Aristotle provides a wonderful definition, which still rings true right up to the present, in contrast to many of his ideas, which are so quaint and anachronistic as to sound ridiculous. Hence: “Friendship is a specifically human fact, the explanation and goal of which must be sought without recourse to the laws of nature or a transcendent Good extending beyond the framework of empirical existence.”

Thus, friendship is not conditioned by nature, and has no apparent goal. It consists in the search for a kindred spirit with whom to share one’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings—right down to “sacrificing one’s life.” But in order to achieve this happiness, one must feed friendship with time, time that is part and parcel of one’s own, and only, life: going for a walk down Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, for example, and drinking a beer, even if you’d prefer another beverage, since your friend likes beer; or going to his grandmother’s birthday party; or reading the same books and listening to the same music—so that eventually you create a small, warm, enclosed space together, in which jokes are understood by a single word or gesture, opinions are exchanged through a mere glance, and interaction is more intimate than anything one can achieve with someone of another sex. With rare exceptions.

But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart, and the need to share their daily experiences and events—whether large, small, or completely trivial—had exhausted itself. A telephone call once a week, once a month, or on holidays was sufficient.

Of course, this growing apart happened gradually. The history of the friendship the three friends shared had an irrevocable significance; but five or six years after graduating from school, it was possible to look back and identify the points or moments when the divergence began. Take Mikha, for instance.

Ilya could remember Mikha’s personal evolution—how he followed a trajectory of enthusiasm for the revolutionary Mayakovsky, the magical Blok, and that Pasternak who could write:

Eight volleys from the Neva,

And a ninth.

Tired, like glory.

Like—(from left and right

They lurch headlong).

Like—(the distances shout out:

we’ll get even with you yet).

Like the straining, bursting

Asunder of joints

Of oaths

Once sworn

To the dynasty …

Ilya tolerated Mikha’s revolutionary sympathies. Sanya smiled wanly. Their friendship easily withstood minor differences, divergences in the placement of accent and tone. Pierre Zand, the festival visitor they befriended, a young Russian-Belgian, troubled Mikha to the depths of his soul with his antagonism toward the Revolution. Mikha decided to establish a personal and dispassionate perspective on communism. This took more than two years. First he read Marx, then he reversed his steps, beating a retreat into the past to read the early socialists, who were all fairly accessible. After that he stumbled over Hegel, and, executing a pirouette, made a beeline for Lenin.

Marlen, his uncle (they had grown steadily closer over the years), viewed his interests with suspicion:

“You’re reading the wrong stuff, Mikha. There were many revolutionaries in our family, and they were all executed, except for Mark Naumovich. And Mark Naumovich survived because he first volunteered to serve in the NKVD, and then hightailed it out to the provinces just in time, as some sort of consultant. A very clever fellow, and a bastard if ever there was one.”

“I need to figure it out on my own,” Mikha said in his own defense.

“Well, figure it out then, figure it out,” Marlen said, conciliatory. “If you want to reinvent the wheel, it’s your business.”

Aunt Genya put a bowl of borscht in front of each of them, then served the main dish: meat patties with potatoes. Her son got three, Mikha got two, and she herself got one.

Marlen laughed, pointing at the meat patties.

“There’s your socialist equality! And everywhere you look, it’s always the same!”

Mikha racked his brains, trying to get to the bottom of things. He read and read; what he read generated many questions, and few answers. He tried to talk about socialism with Victor Yulievich, who just grimaced and said that he had no predilection for social science.

Ilya, who had one of the most inquiring and informed minds of all the people he knew, threw fuel on the fire. The most combustible, in his view, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the samizdat they had lost, without ever knowing what it was, in the briefcase of Pierre’s uncle Orlov, the French diplomat, in 1957. Nineteen Eighty-four made a deep impression on Mikha. He was far more receptive to the artistic word than to the dry erudition of socioeconomic scholasticism.

Ilya could boast of a small victory, at least: Mikha’s revolutionary ardor had cooled. Nevertheless, they began spending less time together. And Sanya was off in his own musical universe. He was up to his ears in arcane theories of scales, and his best friends could never have been interlocutors on this subject.

It was Mikha’s affinity for literature that had led him to the difficult and sad situation in which he found himself in the late autumn of 1966, unemployed and barred from graduate studies.

His would-be adviser, Yakov Petrovich Rink, was distressed about what had transpired and tried to help Mikha. Within the bounds of reason. Yakov Petrovich was unquestionably decent, but he was also pliant and adaptable. And so clever that he understood perfectly well how complicated and difficult it was to combine decency and pliancy when faced with the powers that be, with whom he had successfully negotiated his whole life. In Mikha Melamid’s case, however, he had not managed. It was a great disappointment, and it grieved him; but it hadn’t prevented them both from continuing work on their very important common cause.

Yakov Petrovich had made several attempts to help the young man find employment. Yakov Petrovich had countless connections in the pedagogical world, but even he wasn’t able to find a job that would allow Mikha to carry out his experimental research: implementing new methods of speech therapy.

Thus, every avenue of scholarly work was closed to Mikha.

The only thing Rink, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, was able to do was arrange for the unsuccessful graduate-school candidate to teach literature in a night school—and only on a part-time basis. The eight hours a week he taught offered them meager sustenance for only eight days—and there were at least thirty days in a month. Alyona was still going to college, and her studies completely exhausted her energies, which were not very ample to begin with.

Mikha became convinced that he would never be able to find work on his own.

At the local Board of Education, where he went to inquire about a permanent job as a teacher of Russian language and literature, he was told there were no vacancies in Moscow, and that he would have to go to the Ministry of Education—maybe they would have something on offer in the provinces. They told him to leave his résumé and contact information with them just in case; sometimes there were temporary vacancies.

Mikha didn’t go to the ministry. Alyona was a young wife and still a student; nothing could have induced him to leave her behind in Moscow to go it alone.

Victor Yulievich, who had left teaching, felt that Mikha didn’t stand a chance to find a job as a schoolteacher. Tutoring was his only hope. And he gave him a student right away. But none of that—work by the hour, private lessons—could really satisfy him. He missed the boarding-school children!

By this time Mikha had taken on the dullest and most strenuous job of all—he was loading and unloading cargo at night at the Moscow-Tovarnaya railroad station. The work wasn’t terribly difficult for him, but Alyona objected. Mikha’s eyesight had never been good, and it put too great a strain on his eyes, she said. And she was right.

Another regular source of income was blood donation. He became a donor, but there were limits placed on how often one could do this—only once a month.

Finally, Mikha decided to talk to Ilya about more unconventional ways of earning a living. They planned to meet at the Pokrovsky Gates in breezy Milyutin Park, which had once belonged to the Office of Surveying and Land Management, on a park bench with two broken slats. Each of them had a bottle of beer in his hand and a briefcase at his feet. Sanya wasn’t there. They had decided not to include him in their deliberations.

After they graduated from high school, Ilya was the first of them to realize that he didn’t wish to work for the state—whether on a nine-to-five, or an eight-to-eight, or a three-days-on, three-days-off schedule. He also had no desire to go to college, because everything that truly interested him he could learn without disciplinary regimentation and coercion. He was adept at various means of avoidance, evasion, and disappearance.

The best option was a fictitious hire as an assistant to a scientist or a writer. This kind of opportunity was not easy to come by, but it had guaranteed Ilya virtual independence from the state. A more reliable, but less attractive variant required real input of one’s own time and effort: working in a boiler room, as a concierge, or as a security guard. When it came to earning dough, Ilya knew plenty of ways.

Ilya expounded on this to Mikha, yet again demonstrating his long-acknowledged intellectual superiority.

“You see, Mikha, we’re really talking about two different things here: fulfilling, interesting work, and making money. But I still think that you have to know how to combine them. Let’s take samizdat. The phenomenon itself is remarkable and unprecedented. It’s vital energy that is spread from source to source, establishing threads, forming a sort of spiderweb that links many people. It creates passageways that conduct information in the form of books, magazines, poems, both very old and very new, the latest issues of the samizdat Chronicles. There are streams of Zionist literature printed in Odessa before the Revolution, or in Jerusalem last year; there is religious literature of both émigré and domestic manufacture. The process is in part spontaneous and natural, but not completely. This is a conscious undertaking for me, and, in a sense, a profession. This is the work that earns me a living. And, of course, the cause needs to be developed and expanded.”

Mikha sat rapt and openmouthed, quite literally. A small trace of saliva had even gathered in the corner of his mouth, as happens with a sleeping child. Ilya held forth in an unusually solemn, serious tone. Mikha was completely enraptured with the contents of the lecture, and at the same time filled with pride: that’s our Ilya!

“It’s a fine thing!” Mikha said quietly, somewhat overwhelmed with the greatness of his friend.

At that moment Ilya was himself enamored of his role in furthering world progress. The grandiose picture that he painted did not completely jibe with reality, but it wasn’t pure invention, either. The petty demons of the Russian Revolution—the very ones Dostoevsky described—haunted the darkening recesses of the forlorn, overgrown garden. The long shadow of the completely ingenuous Chekhov was moving in the direction of Immer’s garden store, where the writer had stopped in to buy seeds now and then, and in a neighboring wing, in about the same years, under the patronage of the not completely innocent Savva Morozov, died Levitan, the gentle Jew who sang the praises of Russian nature with his paintbrush …

On this very corner, a few steps away, twenty years before, a tram came to a screeching halt … Yes, Murygin.

But on the whole, progress was on the march; of that there could be no doubt!

Ilya had an intriguing proposal at the ready. Samizdat had become a widespread social phenomenon, and demand for it was growing steadily. By the mid-sixties, the provinces had come alive. Not all samizdat was produced by idealistic enthusiasts. A real market was taking shape, and the most diverse kinds of people were active in it, including those with purely commercial interests. In addition to publications, the cost of which was determined solely by the price of paper or film, new merchandise was appearing that was meant to be sold for profit. Something akin to a trading network was coming to life. One of the key figures in this market was Ilya. Mikha could help with the distribution.

Mikha would never make a stellar distributor, Ilya knew this already. He was too noticeable, too friendly and open, too imprudent. He was also trustworthy, loyal, and responsible, however. Ilya might have thought twice about making such a proposal to Mikha; but he needed to have some means of survival. And besides, he had a wife!

Mikha was appointed as a traveling salesman.

The first trips didn’t take him very far afield. Stuffing his backpack with samizdat, he set out on the commuter train or the bus for a nearby station: Obninsk, Dubna, or Chernogolovka. He would meet other young research associates, hand over the literature, take the money in exchange, and return home on the same day.

Getting acquainted with them was strictly forbidden. Mikha introduced himself as Andrei, and the counteragent didn’t introduce himself at all. He usually said something like: “Alexander Ivanovich sent me.”

From the money he received, Mikha would get five honestly earned rubles each time. The money stung his hand a little.

Working in the boarding school for the deaf-mute had been so much better. It had satisfied in some ideal way everything Mikha needed and wanted—a modest but sufficient income; absolute pleasure and satisfaction from the creative, useful work he did; a rare feeling of being in just the right place, at just the right time. That work, and the money he earned, had never stung his hand!

* * *

After two months, Mikha admitted to Ilya that he wanted more meaningful work than merely delivering goods in a backpack to different addresses. He was well versed in the ins and outs of samizdat, and he considered himself to be entitled to something more creative …

“Fine, all right. I knew this was bound to happen.” Ilya looked somewhat dissatisfied, though he usually swelled with pleasure when he could solve other people’s problems. “Edik is the one you need. Edik! You know, the tall fellow,” Ilya said.

Mikha remembered. He had delivered some books to him. And he wasn’t someone you could easily forget. He was nearly six feet six, and had a pink baby face with nothing growing on it but thick, bushy eyebrows.

Ilya took Mikha to meet Edik. Edik lived with his mother and his wife, Zhenya, in a separate two-room apartment. Looking around, Mikha again grew enamored of someone else’s home, which didn’t resemble anything he had seen before. Edik’s mother was a specialist in Buddhism. The walls were covered with Eastern paintings and images, which were, as Edik explained to him, Buddhist icons. Edik’s wife was an archaeologist, and she had left traces of her profession in their home: three unprepossessing earthenware pots. The women were not home at the moment.

Edik published the samizdat magazine Gamayun. It consisted of twenty pages of onionskin paper, crudely stitched together between two pieces of blue cardboard. It was a literary and social-commentary journal that thus far existed as one copy of the first issue. Mikha grabbed the magazine and examined it from cover to cover.

“Interesting! But why Gamayun?” he said.

“Alkonost and Phoenix were already taken; I don’t like Sirin. Gamayun was just the thing.”

“Yet another bird from Slavic mythology?”

Edik explained:

“Sure. But this little bird is a great intellectual. It knows all the secrets of the universe. It also has the gift of prophecy. We initially thought we would call it The Historical Project. But we decided that was too dry. It’s an educational journal. With modern poetry, naturally.”

Mikha was more than ready to take part in the publication of a journal that would open the eyes and ears of the unenlightened.

Ilya left Mikha at Edik’s, and the new friends shared a dinner of grayish macaroni. After the macaroni they agreed fairly quickly that the magazine should concentrate on literary and social commentary, rather than political. That is, politics would be kept to a minimum. Edik was interested in historical prognostication, and the analysis of social trends, tastes, and preferences—sociological subjects, in other words.

“As far as literature goes, I am most interested in poetry and science fiction. Science fiction is able to generalize the processes under way in the world and offer interesting prognoses. Nowadays, Western science fiction functions as futurology, the philosophy of the future. I simply don’t have time to take it on, though. If you would answer for it, it would be fantastic.”

Mikha thought about it: he had never been exposed to any science fiction. He promised to keep it in mind.

Right on the spot they decided on the contents of the poetry section for the next issue. There would be a large selection of works by one poet, and one or two poems each by five to eight other writers. Mikha suggested Brodsky as the featured poet, and began murmuring rapturously:

“General! Our maps are crap. I pass.

The north is not here at all, but at the North Pole.

And the equator is broader than the side stripes on your trousers.

Because the front, General, is in the south.

At such a distance a walkie-talkie turns any command

Into boogie-woogie.”

“Who are you going to surprise with Brodsky? Listen, there are new poets, nearly unknown:

‘Memory is an armless equestrian statue

You gallop wildly, but

You have no arms

Today you shout loudly in the empty corridor

You flicker at the corridor’s end

It was evening and tea swirled aromatically

Ancient trees of steam grew out of the cups

In silence, each admired his life

And a girl in yellow admired it most of all…’”

“Yes, it’s really good. Who wrote it?”

“Who? A nobody. Young fellow from Kharkov. Came to Moscow not long ago. No one knows him. But in five years they will. Like everyone knows Brodsky now. I’m willing to bet on it. He’s the one we need to publish.”

“I’m not so sure. I think we should take Khvostenko,” Mikha said.

“I love Khvost, but what is he without his guitar? This other fellow will make a stronger impression…”

“What’s his name?”

“What does it matter? I’m telling you—everyone will know him in five years. And you want Khvostenko?” Edik was getting angry, and the good-natured Mikha began feeling uncomfortable.

“This is absurd! We haven’t even started working together, and we’re already quarreling.”

Edik laughed. “That’s what always happens. I’m constantly falling out with my friends. It’s just my character.”

“What idiots we are!” Mikha said. “Gorbanevskaya! Natalia Gorbanevskaya! She’s the one we need! She’d be ideal.” And, his voice full of pathos, he began to recite:

“It will not perish in our wake—

The dry grass smolders.

It will not perish in our wake—

The millstones are still.

In our wake not a step, not a sigh,

no blood, no blood-soaked sweat,

No blood-sealed debt,

will perish in our wake.

The fire runs through the grass,

The fire presses to the trees,

And for those reclining in the foliage

A day of reckoning will come…”

“Done! There can be no objections to Gorbanevskaya! We just have to ask her,” Edik said.

“But it’s samizdat! Why ask permission? We’ll take these three poems, addressed to Brodsky.”

With his passion for the literary classics—the poetic correspondence between Pushkin and Vyazemsky, or the epistolary exchange of Herzen and Turgenev, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, or Gogol and his chosen friends—he wanted to elaborate on the subject immediately.

“It would be good to find poems of Brodsky’s addressed to Gorbanevskaya, or, for example, poems of Gorbanevskaya addressed to someone else!”

“To Pushkin, for instance! Go ahead, commission her to do it!” Edik said sarcastically.

But Mikha was supremely serious.

“No, that’s not what I mean. You know, it’s a good idea to look for poems addressed to friends. A poetic conversation between fellow poets. This one, for instance:

‘In the madhouse

Crush your palms,

Smash your forehead against the wall,

Like smashing your face in a snowbank…’”

“I remember that one. It’s to Galanskov,” Edik said.

“Here’s another one. Listen.

‘Brush the bliss of half-sleep from your cheek

And open your eyes until the eyelids cry in pain.

The filth and whitewash of the hospital—

A volunteer’s flag of your captivity.’”

“I know that one, too. It’s to Dimka Borisov. How do you know her poems so well?”

“I heard her read her poems twice at my father-in-law’s house. And I memorized them. She seems rather gloomy and unapproachable; but her poems are full of tenderness. I can’t say I liked her as a person. But she writes the kinds of poems I would like to have written myself.”

* * *

They decided that Mikha would go to Natalia and ask her for some new poems.

Then Edik remembered about some high-flying intellectual from the philosophy department at Moscow State University. He could write an article about contemporary American science fiction.

The third part of the magazine was a large section entitled “News.” And there was plenty of it. A large number of independently thinking people first whispered in corners among themselves, then spoke half out loud, and, finally, went out and joined demonstrations, protesting ever more boldly and conscientiously. They were detained, tried, sentenced to prison, and set free again, and life was full of daily events that people found out about from one another, or from Western radio stations: everyone picked up some bit of news or other.

Along with the human rights activists, there were also the Crimean Tatars who had been expelled from Crimea twenty years before and now wished to return; Jews who demanded the right to emigrate to Israel, from which they had been expelled two thousand years before; adherents to many kinds of religions; nationalists, from Lithuanians to Russians; and many others. All of them were at odds with the Soviet authorities. And things were happening at every turn.

Edik was not a member of any particular group. He considered himself to be an objective journalist, and his point of departure was that society had to be informed about what was going on. Mikha was prepared to facilitate this in every way he could.

Suddenly, they realized it was already past one in the morning.

“Where’s Zhenya, I wonder?” Edik said. They were not in the habit of keeping tabs on each other, but they usually told each other of their whereabouts.

Mikha gasped, then set out for home in haste. It was too late to get public transport. A chance trolleybus took him to Rachmanovsky Lane, where a herd of trolleybuses converged to spend the night. He ran the last twenty minutes home. Alyona was asleep, and didn’t ask Mikha to account for himself.

* * *

Life rolled along steadily and pleasantly. After Aunt Genya’s death, her old room crammed with dusty junk and bric-a-brac seemed to have dissolved into oblivion. In the new room that took its place, everything was clean, white, and new. Alyona’s drafting table, with Whatman paper clipped to it, stood next to the window. She was about to graduate from the graphic arts department, and her graduation project was to illustrate Hoffman’s fairy tales. A wide, intricate border with Masonic motifs wound about the margins of every page.

Instead of the weekly watch at the boarding school, Mikha’s days, from morning till night, were now filled with any number of activities. He was surrounded by new acquaintances. Their most frequent visitors were Edik and Zhenya. Although Zhenya was plain, her mouth was full of infectious laughter (though not many teeth), and she was an attractive, sweet person. Alyona, to Mikha’s delight, would smile weakly at Zhenya’s straightforward jokes. The four of them became good friends, and often spent time at one another’s houses, talking and drinking tea and wine.

Alyona seemed to come to life, to awaken. Her usual expression—like a child just getting up from a nap who hasn’t quite decided whether to laugh or cry—became more defined: not yet laughing, but certainly not crying. She even became more responsive to Mikha’s conjugal expectations. Since they had gotten married, Alyona had seemed even more unavailable than before, when she would now and then come to him in Milyaevo without being asked, and stay overnight, tender and complaisant.

In their married state, things seemed to get in the way, each obstacle more awkward and absurd than the one before. Either their sexual activity wound her up so much that she couldn’t sleep afterward, or, on the contrary, it wearied her so much that she couldn’t get up in the morning and would have to sleep the entire day.

It was, most likely, a slight sexual pathology—perhaps a consequence of traumatic premarital experiences. Feeling desirable, sought after, an unattainable object—this was for her the epitome of pleasure in sexual relations. She hungered perpetually for affirmation of Mikha’s ready desire, and was adept in the subtle art of keeping her husband interested and aroused, but avoiding sexual contact. The less frequently Mikha was able to indulge in the full-fledged conjugal rite, the sharper and giddier were his feelings for her.

As Alyona became more inaccessible to him, love raised him to unprecedented heights of feeling. In a secluded nook of his consciousness, he was constantly at work writing poems. He had long before stopped sending her love poetry, which Alyona had greeted with a set mouth. That didn’t prevent him from writing it, however.

Love is the work of the spirit.

Still, the body

Does not hold itself aloof from it.

A hand resting in a hand—

What joy!

For degrees of spiritual fire

And the white heat of corporeal passion

There is a single scale of measure.

Among the new friends who were always coming around to their “grown-up home” sans parents, which was moreover in the center of town, were admirers of Alyona. When men would show up, she grew animated, sitting up straight and smiling vaguely. Mikha felt fresh pangs of male jealousy; Alyona experienced a complex satisfaction. Their home began to exhibit all the hallmarks of a literary salon: the canonically prescribed love for the hostess, tea drinking, cakes and cookies, conversation about art, reciting the latest poetry, and guest lecturers on intellectually stimulating topics. In this way Alyona reproduced (with allowances for another generation) her parents’ home, but with more refined tastes.

* * *

At about that time, traveling through Russia came into vogue. Backpacks, canoes, trains, risky hitchhiking, spending the night in tents or in abandoned villages—Ilya, of course, was the first in their group of friends to experience all this. He adored these trips and often went without any companions, returning home with rarities fit for a museum: books, icons, objects of peasant life. He made friends in far-flung parts of the Russian north, Central Asia, the Altai.

Mikha never joined Ilya in his travels; he would never have left his aunt for long while she was still alive. Early in the spring of 1967, two young couples—Mikha and Alyona and Edik and Zhenya—seized by a new passion for traveling, went to Crimea for the first time, to Koktebel. The genre of their journey was a pilgrimage—to the grave site of a poet Mikha revered.

It took them two days and nights to get to Feodosia. There was still snow on the ground in Moscow. In the morning, as they journeyed southward, they passed through warm rain, having already gone through floating remnants of snow, and through fogs and mists. After midday, entering another climatic zone, through the train window they observed roadside willows up to their knees in water, with swollen joints and straining branches. In Feodosia it rained on them again—gray and pearly iridescent. They got on a bus and, bumping and jostling all the way, continued on to Planernoe—where the poet Maximilian Voloshin had lived. The landscape—smoky, quivering, milky, and opaline—riveted their gaze. Columns of trucks were coming toward the bus from the other direction. They were excavating one and a half million tons of Koktebel sand, urgently needed for the purposes of the national economy. But what the travelers didn’t realize was that before their very eyes the treasure of the ancient shoreline was being destroyed. The people who might have realized this were almost all gone by now.

When they got out of the bus, they heard the roar of the Black Sea for the first time, and began moving toward the captivating sound. The sea was raging for the second week in a row, in accordance with its seasonal mandate. It was even harder to accommodate the sea with one’s vision than one’s ears. Mikha and Zhenya were experiencing the sea for the first time. Alyona’s parents had once taken her to the seaside by the Caucasus Mountains, and Edik knew the sea—albeit a different one altogether: the Baltic.

* * *

They turned to walk along the shore in the direction of Voloshin’s house. They didn’t ask anyone the way—the road simply beckoned them. They recognized the house immediately, by its eloquent appearance, its tower, its contrast with everything else that was built here after the Revolution, after the war. They sat on some rocks below the house. They pulled out a bottle of wine and the remains of their Moscow rations.

Mikha couldn’t contain himself and began reciting poems. He had already burst out in a fit of lyrical passion on the train, but they had squelched it.

“As in a small seashell, the Great

Ocean roars its breath,

As its flesh shimmers and burns

with tides and silvery mist,

and its curves repeat

in the motion and scrolls of a wave—

Thus, in your coves,

O dark land of Cimmeria, my soul

is imprisoned and transfigured.”

The wind tore at their jackets and carried off their words. They huddled together, but Mikha couldn’t stop. He didn’t even notice when a flabby old woman with an ornate walking stick in her hand, wearing a huge, tattered raincoat and turbid glasses, glued together at the bridge, appeared in their midst, listening intently.

“Let’s go into the house,” she said. The hospitable invitation contradicted the severity and gloom of her expression. She led them to a house they could not have imagined in their wildest dreams …

This was Voloshin’s widow, Maria Stepanovna. She gave them a personal tour of her home. On the first floor, which at that time was called “Corpus 1,” vacationing miners working in the Donbas region were usually housed; they hadn’t yet arrived on their local Communist Party tourist vouchers. The widow tried to fend off this invasion as best she could, but there was little she could do. She opened up two rooms for the young people on the lower floor.

“You can live here, until the strangers arrive.”

* * *

They spent several happy days under Maria Stepanovna’s wing. Mikha and Edik undertook some urgent household tasks and repairs, of which there were many. Zhenya and Alyona washed floors, dusted the books on the tall shelves. They spent one whole day tidying up Voloshin’s grave. Mikha and Edik restored the path leading to it, which had crumbled during the winter.

In the evenings they sat in Voloshin’s freezing study, drank tea, and talked under the huge sculpture of Queen Taiakh, which was described in almost all the memoirs of his friends. Sometimes local inhabitants in their declining years would stop in—old ladies, some of them girlish, some of them like reptiles, as well as young writers from the House of the Arts. Once a famous young poet came over with a can of unbottled wine; another time his rival visited. They hated each other with a vengeance, but, in the tradition of the house, they refrained from quarreling when they both turned up at the same time.

They were both too Soviet and official for Mikha’s and Edik’s taste. But, as soon became clear, they were no better, nor worse, than those who congregated around Mayakovsky’s statue.

At the end, when the young people were preparing to go home, Maria Stepanovna commanded them all to go to Staryi Krym. The way was not short—about ten miles—but unless they took this little detour, they could not be considered “kin.”

“You’ll be able to rest up a bit there, my friend will feed you.”

Maria Stepanovna wondered whether she should send these young people to a rival widow. Assol, as she was called, had already done time in prison and returned to Staryi Krym, to fulfill her duties as the writer Grin’s widow. Perhaps Faina Lvovna would be better, Maria Stepanovna thought, and gave them a note for a local lady whose husband, a dentist, fixed all the teeth of the elderly inhabitants.

They decided to go home by way of Simferopol, with a trip to Bakhchisaray. Maria Stepanovna explained that it was inadmissable not to go there—it was the very heart of old Crimea. The route was a bit convoluted: from Staryi Krym, bypassing Koktebel, to Bakhchisaray, where they would stay overnight, then go directly to Simferopol, to the railroad station.

Real spring had already begun in Staryi Krym. The leaves on the trees looked like delicate green lace. People sat in their gardens, prepared the beds for planting, or rushed about, setting out seedlings. The almond trees had blossomed.

The whole way, Mikha and Edik debated the nature of Soviet power, which, in Mikha’s view, was weaker on the periphery of the empire than in the center, and more humane as well. Edik did not agree. He even claimed that in some places they were crueler and more stupid, citing Voloshin as an example: if he had lived closer to the center of power, they would have executed him by 1918.

Zhenya and Alyona walked behind their husbands, like Eastern wives, and talked about art. Alyona didn’t approve of Voloshin’s watercolors, which were all over the house. Zhenya argued hotly that one couldn’t judge this artist by the immediate fruits of his activities—paintings or poems. His greatness was spiritual in nature, and when the specious verdict made way for a lasting, authentic one, the true scale of his greatness would become clear. Zhenya was a well-educated young woman. She read both French and English, and even knew a thing or two about anthroposophy. This irked Alyona somewhat.

In Staryi Krym, they had dinner at Faina Lvovna’s. She received them with great solemnity, like visiting dignitaries from a friendly kingdom. She was wearing very long beads, and a dress with a dropped waist from the NEP period in the mid-1920s, as well as a flirtatious tendril pasted to her forehead. She fed her guests a modest but fashionable meal—bean soup and patties made from some indeterminate kind of grain, with kissel gravy.

They walked around the local cemetery, and strolled past the house of Alexander Grin. It was closed, but it felt like the residents had just stepped out and would be back any moment.

They arrived in Bakhchisaray in early evening—they were able to hitch a ride just in time. Again on the recommendation of Maria Stepanovna, they went to see a curator at the museum of local history. They immediately hit it off, and soon it seemed they had known each other their whole lives. Here, in the Crimea, there seemed to be a secret society of “former” people. They were privy to some arcane secret of the Crimea, but, however much they revealed of it, the secret remained intact. The curator turned out to be not Crimean at all, but from Leningrad; still, she seemed to be a keeper of secrets. She showed them wax figures of harem wives and eunuchs, bronze vases, a fountain that recalled Pushkin, “the tomb of khans, the final home of sovereigns…” The woman from the museum said that she would take them to Chuft-Kale the next morning, but that they couldn’t stay overnight at her house, since her aunt had arrived that night from Petersburg for a visit.

In the evening they went to a hotel, in which they found the ordinary provincial squalor. They stowed their rucksacks in the storeroom, a small closet next to the reception desk. They agreed that the rooms would be waiting for them later in the evening, and they would register then. They went out to walk through the dark town, and to have a meal in some eating-house somewhere. They couldn’t find any place to eat, but they did find a grocery store that was about to close in five minutes.

Mikha went to get their rucksacks out of the storeroom, and began digging around for their passports. He found them, and put them on the desk in front of the receptionist. She began inspecting them diligently, looking in the last pages for their officially registered addresses, and the stamp proving they were legally married.

Just at this time, a family entered the hotel. It was a husband and wife, who were getting on in years, and a daughter who looked about fourteen. They were Tatars from Central Asia. This was evident from the Uzbek tubeteika on the man’s head, from the woman’s striped dress, from their high cheekbones, from the silver bracelets studded with red carnelian on the fragile wrists of the girl, and from the anxiety written on their faces. The man pulled two passports out of the inner pocket of his suit coat and placed them in front of the receptionist.

The jacket was not new; the back of it was faded. Nearly the entire front, however, from his shoulders to his waist, was covered with military decorations and orders.

The sullen receptionist put the passports of the Moscow travelers aside, and opened their passports. She shook her head.

“There’s no room.”

“What do you mean, there’s no room? You’re lying! There are vacancies!” Mikha objected. “We have booked two rooms. Please give this family one of ours.”

“We don’t have any for you, either,” the woman said, pushing the pile of passports toward Mikha.

“What? We made an agreement!”

“Our first priority is to serve business travelers, and only then to accommodate ‘savages.’ There’s no room here.”

“We traveled more than a thousand miles to look at the graves of our ancestors. Here are our return tickets. In two days we are flying back to Tashkent,” the man said, still holding out some hope.

“Don’t you understand Russian? I said there’s no room here!”

“I understand Russian. Perhaps in the private sector it would be possible to stay for only one night?”

“Stay wherever you want. It’s not my concern! But just remember—you’ll be answerable for violating the passport rules.”

Mikha was boiling with anger. His response to injustice was instantaneous and passionate, even corporeal. It felt like a hammer pounding in his temples. His hands spontaneously curled up into fists.

“Bastards! What bastards!” he whispered to Edik. “Do you realize what’s happening? This is a Tatar family that was deported…” Just a few days before, their friend Maria Stepanovna had told them about the events of May 1944. This information was still fresh in his mind, and the injustice of it still rankled. “While this man was fighting at the front, they evicted his family from their home and deported them!”

“Take it easy,” Edik whispered to him. “We’ll think of something.”

The much-decorated Tatar wrapped up the passports in a silk handkerchief, and put them carefully back into his inner pocket.

“Let’s get out of here. They’ll call the police any minute now!” Edik bent down nearly in half to whisper to the Tatar.

He nodded, and they all made their way to the door, onto the street, where it was already pitch-dark. The darkness seemed peaceful and safe, in contrast to the loathsomeness of the reception area, albeit illuminated by electricity.

Natasha Khlopenko, the receptionist, was already dialing the number to contact the police. This was her duty—to inform them about Tatars arriving in Bakhchisaray. But the officer on duty didn’t answer the phone, and she threw down the receiver in relief: her mother was a Karaite Jew, and her father a recently arrived Ukrainian. It wasn’t that she felt any special sympathy toward the deported Tatars, but more that she didn’t want to be an accessory to this long-standing war of nationalities and peoples, which involved her to a degree. To a very small degree.

Seven people left the hotel, and the Tatar man silently headed up their exodus.

“Let’s go. I know a place where we can find shelter for the night. You’re not afraid of cemeteries, are you?”

“No, let’s go,” Edik said.

Although it was completely dark, the Tatar walked confidently westward, and up a hill.

They walked about a mile and a half, and came to an ancient Tatar cemetery.

The ruins of a small mausoleum seemed cozy, rather than threatening. And perhaps the Tatar’s trust in this place was so great that it communicated itself to the young people. They sat on a slope—or reclined, as it were. The slope was as comfortable as a floating pillow. Edik pulled out a bottle of Crimean port from his rucksack. The domestic Zhenya took out the feta cheese they had bought in the store, some salted tomatoes, and bread, which they had planned to eat in their room at the hotel.

They didn’t light a fire. A full moon suddenly rose in the sky, illuminating the landscape with an intense brilliance: every stone, every branch, became visible.

The two fat braids of the Tatar girl gleamed in the moonlight with an oily sheen, and her silver bracelets shimmered. Her mother unfolded a muslin napkin and took out some dry Tatar pies, and they all partook of their feast in solemn silence and spiritual concord.

After the meal a conversation got under way, little by little—curiously disjointed, not following any particular path, but somehow concerned with everything at once—about the strange circumstances that had brought them all together, seemingly random, disparate people, unrelated through the past or the future, unconnected by blood or by fate … about the beauty that seemed to have dropped down from the heavens …

The moon retreated, slipping down to the edge of the sky, and an hour later a rose-colored ribbon of light appeared in the east, brightening the comforting darkness. The Tatar man, whose name was Mustafa, said:

“I’ve remembered this dawn so many times, through so many years. As a boy, I herded cattle here. I looked at these mountains thousands of times, always waiting for the first ray of sunlight. Sometimes it seemed to just shoot out. I thought I would never see it again.”

When it was light, they parted ways. The young people went to Chufut-Kale, and the Tatar family stayed in the ancient cemetery. Mustafa wanted to find his grandfather’s grave.

They agreed to meet at two o’clock at the bus station, and to travel to Moscow together.

At the bus station, it was impossible to avoid the police. The young people surrounded “their” Tatars, and began making a happy commotion. Zhenya waylaid two policemen, flirting with them and babbling away to them about nothing. Eventually Edik pulled out his press pass, long expired, and waved it in front of the lieutenant’s face. The provincial police turned out to be shyer than their Moscow counterparts. Or perhaps Edik’s towering height and horn-rimmed glasses threw them off. In any case, the bus opened its doors, gave an impatient roar, and all seven of them packed in and drove off. Or maybe these servants of the law just didn’t want to take on any extra trouble for themselves.

After that everything went like clockwork. The train staff turned out to be from Kazakhstan, and they put the “illegal” passengers in “illegal” seats, shielding them from the conductors and guards the whole way, until they finally arrived at Komsomol Square two days later. A half hour later, Mikha and Alyona and their Tatar guests were already in the long-suffering Aunt Genya’s room. In another twenty-four hours, the former Hero of the Soviet Union and former captain Usmanov, one of the initiators of the movement for Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland, with his wife, Aliye, and his daughter, Ayshe, took a flight from the capital of our homeland to the capital of Uzbekistan, and finally sat down in their Tashkent home, where their friends and relatives were waiting for them. Usmanov, a Communist and a hero, placed a handful of stones from the ancient Muslim cemetery of Eski-Yurt on a tray.

“Here. Look at them. Our stones have come back to us; now it’s our turn to go back to our stones.”

Henceforth, young Tatars would frequent Mikha’s home. They came with petitions, with letters of protest, with requests and demands. They stayed overnight, sleeping on air mattresses on the floor. The cause of these Tatar strangers was closer to Mikha’s heart than the efforts of Jews to return to Israel. After all, the Jewish exile had lasted for two thousand years already; it was ancient history, while the Tatars’ was still fresh. Their homes and wells in Crimea had not all been destroyed. The Tatars still remembered the Soviet soldiers who had evicted them and then deported them, and neighbors who had occupied their homes.

Mikha got caught up in this cause which was not directly his own, drawn in by his characteristic unflagging sympathy and warmth. He helped them write letters, distribute them, and establish contacts. Several times at the behest of his Tatar friends he traveled to Crimea, and he and his friend Ravil collected memoirs about the deportations of 1944.

He and Edik published their magazine, but, quite predictably, the literary section shrank and the political section grew. They also added a new section called “The Periphery,” in which they discussed the plight of various ethnic minorities and nationalities, the extinction of the smaller peoples, their forced assimilation. Edik, with his characteristic academicism, wished to stay within the framework of anthropology and demographics, which lent the magazine an aura of scholarship. This did not diminish its anti-imperialist bent, however.

* * *

Ilya made photocopies of all eight issues. The editions usually numbered about forty copies. A full collection of all the different issues has not been preserved, but individual issues may still be found in various archives, both Western and KGB.

* * *

Mikha hadn’t seen Sanya in nearly a year, and met with Ilya only on matters of business.

* * *

On the night of August 21, 1968, an event took place that would change everything: Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia. Actually, this was a coalition of troops from five countries, but the initiative was indubitably a Soviet one. They called it “Operation Danube.” Russian tanks rolled into Prague, dealing the strongest possible blow to the global Communist movement.

The whole night through Mikha fiddled with the corrugated knobs on the old Telefunken, his only legacy from Aunt Genya, listening to the Western news reports. Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face” lay in pieces, and the last illusions were shattered.

For so many years Mikha had studied Marxism, trying to work out how such wonderful ideas about justice could become so misshapen, so distorted, in their implementation; but now the truth was laid bare—it was a grandiose lie, cynicism, inconceivable cruelty, shameless manipulations of people who had lost their humanity, their human dignity and self-worth, out of fear. This fear enveloped the whole country like a dark cloud. One could call this cloud Stalinism; but Mikha had already understood that Stalinism was only a singular instance of the evil of this enormous, universal, timeless political despotism.

Mikha was prepared to rush out onto the square to share his anguish and horror. But first he went to grab a pencil. He wanted to write a poem; but what came out instead was a vehement tract. For three days Mikha wrestled with the words, but they never seemed as elegant and convincing on paper as they were when they originated in his heart. What he was feeling was a desire to find the right words, and to express them, so that everyone would read them and understand, and everyone would agree …

* * *

On Sunday the twenty-fifth, Sergei Borisovich called and asked the young people to come by immediately. From him, they learned the latest news: that on Red Square, next to Lobnoe Mesto, also known as the Place of Skulls, there had been a demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The names of seven people who went out onto the square were already known. All the demonstrators but one had been arrested. Next to the former site of public executions, she had sat down with a three-month-old baby in her arms, holding a Czech flag.

“Gorbanevskaya!” Mikha said.

Chernopyatov confirmed it. His house was full of people. They were already discussing who would write a letter of protest, and to whom it would be addressed. Mikha shut himself up in Alyona’s room and finished the piece that he had been working on all those days, without being able to finish it. Now, after the demonstration, he reworked it, shifted the accent of the argument, and titled it: “The Five-Minute Demonstration of the Magnificent Seven on Lobnoe Mesto.” He handed it to Chernopyatov, who frowned.

“As usual, too much pathos, Mikha!”

In the evening he showed the piece to two more people: Edik and Ilya.

Edik considered it to be too wordy and vague. Ilya took the piece of paper without saying a thing.

Twenty-four hours later, the Voice of America was reporting what had happened on Red Square—about the five-minute demonstration and about the magnificent seven. The text had been edited and shortened. Still, there could be no doubt, it was Mikha’s piece!

So someone must have passed it to them! One of two people: Ilya or Edik. Unbelievable!

Everyone was nervous, and tried to keep a low profile. Searches and arrests were taking place throughout the city. In contrast to what the century had seen prior to these events, the numbers of human casualties were small: around a hundred civilians killed on the Czech side, and nineteen Soviet troops. After the successful completion of the operation, about two thousand people were arrested in Czechoslovakia. In Russia, the numbers were negligible: the seven demonstrators on Red Square and ten more demonstrators, unknown and unsung, in the provinces.

A major trial was being planned for the protesters. Chernopyatov knew them all, and all the information about the trial filtered down to him.

Mikha and Edik were planning to publish a new issue of Gamayun devoted entirely to the Crimean Tatar movement before the New Year holidays. Putting together a literary section was proving to be the most difficult part, but with the help of his Tatar friends, Mikha was able to find a Crimean Tatar poet living in Uzbekistan. His name was Eshref Shemi-zade. The Tatars did a word-for-word translation, and Mikha translated excerpts from the semidestroyed poem. The excerpts were written with the poet’s lifeblood, and Mikha, in anguish himself, somehow managed to make a rendering:

It’s not a dog that sets up a terrible howl

In the icy Moscow night.

It’s the Kremlin leader, craving blood,

Insatiable. He howls and snarls …

Just before the New Year, Mikha had his baptism by fire. His house was searched. Four men scoured the empty room, taking a long time, then, bewildered by its unyielding transparency, they began to knock on the walls to see if they could discover something that way. On a bookshelf, among the books, they found a packet of letters that had belonged to his late aunt Genya. The letters were wrapped in gray paper and bound with coarse string into smaller bundles, according to year. On every bundle there was a date: one bundle per year, dating from 1915 to 1955. There were forty in all. It was family correspondence with relatives from Arkhangelsk, Karaganda, and the Urals. Mikha had found the letters not long before, when they were discarding the wardrobe. He had kept them at the request of Marlen, but he hadn’t even thought to read them, out of a sense of delicacy and tact. Now the police were hastily untying the string; but when they saw the dates, they lost interest. That was unfortunate: among the letters was, among other things, correspondence between the legendary Samuil and Lenin, as well as between Samuil and Trotsky. There was also an extremely interesting letter in which Lenin tried to persuade Samuil to find a secret source of financing, independent of government, to develop the world Communist movement …

“Those letters belonged to my aunt. Her son was planning to come by to take a look at them,” Mikha said by way of explanation, taking possession of the letters again.

“Too late now,” the senior officer said gruffly, and grabbed them out of Mikha’s hands.

The whole operation lasted about two hours. There was nowhere to search, and nothing to search for.

They impounded the family correspondence, more out of a sense of professional duty, along with ten pre-Revolutionary poetry collections, almost all of them given to him by Ilya, a rephotographed book by Berdyaev that Mikha kept intending to read, but never got around to, and a small-format, two-volume copy of Doctor Zhivago from Pierre Zand.

All the materials for the journal had been deposited with Edik immediately. Nothing remained in the house. Nonetheless … nonetheless, when he saw the two-volume Pasternak in the hands of the searchers, he felt a hot wave of panic wash over him. He remembered a single page, completely filled with very small handwriting. He remembered where he had put that page—in the first book that came to hand—just after the neighbor had called him to the telephone that was affixed to the wall in the main corridor of the communal apartment.

After he came back to his room, he looked around for the paper, couldn’t find it, and so reconstructed it from memory. And now Mikha remembered—he had put the little piece of paper in that very two-volume copy of Doctor Zhivago.

The paper was valuable. For the next issue of the magazine, Mikha had prepared a demographic rundown of the deportees from Crimea during the war. The Crimean Tatars had conducted a poll among the deportees and their descendants in Central Asia, collating the information with old, long-forgotten data. It was a huge project, in which hundreds of Tatar deportees took part.

On the page, in minuscule calligraphic handwriting, under a heading in red ink that said, simply, “The Tatars,” was the following text:

1783—around 4 million Tatars in Crimea when it was annexed by Russia

1917—120,000 Tatars

1941—560,000 Tatars in Crimea

1941–42—137,000 Tatar men mobilized, 57,000 of whom were killed

1944—420,000 Tatar (200,000 children) civilians

1944, May 18–20—32,000 NKVD officials took part in the deportation

1944, May 18—200,000 Tatars (official figures) transported to Central Asia

1945—187,000 deportees died (official figure 80,000)

1956—deportee status of Central Asian Tatars revoked, but return to Crimea forbidden

At the bottom there was a note written in blue ink:

Red: Note that the official figures (the number of deportees, for ex.) are artificially lowered; according to our data, 42 percent of the deportees perished in the first year and a half. This doesn’t correspond to official figures, which were all falsified. Ravil is preparing a table from 1945 to 1968. Musa.

There was still hope that they wouldn’t open the Pasternak and find the piece of paper. Mikha was glad that Alyona was staying late at the institute and wouldn’t find the KGB at her home when she got there.

Mikha tried to call Edik immediately, but no one picked up.

* * *

The next morning Mikha and Alyona went to Edik’s house. A tearstained Elena Alekseevna told them that the day before, at the very same time, they had also been searched. But things had ended far worse. They had taken Edik away with them, and he had not yet returned. They had found many rough drafts, materials from the last issue of the magazine with corrections marked in pencil. They also took five issues of the publication Vestnik, the journal of the Russian Christian Student Movement, and a pile of other samizdat publications. Finally, they had confiscated photocopies of what was perhaps the most damning anti-Soviet book, published for the Party elite in a small edition, stamped “Top Secret”—Avtorkhanov’s Technology of Power.

Elena Alekseevna’s room was also subject to unsolicited “cleansing.” They took away two copies of the Bible, a statue of the Buddha, prayer beads, and a photocopy of Buddhist texts. They asked her what language all this anti-Soviet junk was written in. She tried to explain to them that she was a specialist in Buddhism and Eastern studies, and that the two languages she worked in most often were Sanskrit and Tibetan. Also, that the paper they were holding in their hands was a copy of a document written in the seventh century.

There was something almost touching about their fabulous ignorance. When one of the uninvited guests told Elena Alekseevna in a whisper that he knew all about the Buddhist blood sacrifices, she couldn’t contain her laughter, in spite of the fear she felt under the circumstances. Even when she was telling Mikha and Alyona about it, she had to laugh. She knew that the copies would be returned—and even if they weren’t, it wasn’t the end of the world. But she regretted the loss of the family Bible, on the last page of which was written the name of its first owners.

They decided to go see Sergei Borisovich and ask his advice, as someone with a great deal of experience in these matters. His house was, as usual, full of people: some newly released prisoner on his way to Rostov, a man from Central Asia, an elderly woman with the botanical-sounding name of Mallow, whom Mikha had already met before, and Yuly Kim himself, with his guitar. Some people drank tea or coffee, others wine or vodka. Alyona frowned in displeasure. She was always annoyed by these gatherings that smacked of a street fair, a station, or a flophouse. Mikha drew his father-in-law into a corner and told him about Edik. Should he go to the KGB district office and inquire? Perhaps to the central headquarters?

“Well, whether you go or not, they have the right to detain him for up to seventy-two hours without charging him with anything.” Sergei Borisovich knew all of this from personal experience going back to his childhood. “Most likely they won’t tell you anything now. But you need to take some action so that they know there are people looking after his welfare. It will all become clearer in three days.”

Mikha went to see Ilya, and Elena Alekseevna went with Zhenya to Kuznetsky. Most, to the KGB headquarters.

Ilya told Mikha that there had been seven or eight searches of various people that night. Four of them had been detained, but two of them had been released already. He knew nothing about Edik.

Edik Tolmachev was not released three days later. He was charged with “Distribution of False Information Defaming the Government and Social Structure of the USSR,” under Article 190 of the Penal Code.

Again, Mikha went to see his experienced father-in-law, this time about the magazine. He wanted to continue to publish it, but he was uncertain whether he could manage such a complex and important task on his own. Moreover, all the materials for the next issue had been confiscated; he did know how to restore them, however.

Sergei Borisovich was categorical in his answer: no, now was not the time. Mikha was sure to trip up.

As far as Mikha himself was concerned, he began to relish the situation. In the same way that he had once been completely consumed with methods and approaches toward developing the faculty of speech in the deaf, he now felt he was performing a very significant task, playing a crucial role. It seemed to him the future of poetry was in his hands. It was as though someone was instructing him from on high to preserve for posterity everything with intrinsic worth, everything that lived spontaneously, all that escaped the scrutiny of the authorities.

Ilya gave him some wise advice.

“Don’t continue the magazine; make a new one, Mikha! Change the name. Think up some sort of bird, it could even be fun. You’ll be able to manage the poetry yourself, and I’ll introduce you to some artists. I know some art historians; they’re really great. It’s the new avant-garde. I’ll help you make new connections. I know many amazing people. It will be an arts journal. As for politics, it will take care of itself.”

* * *

Three months passed. Just when Mikha had grown tired of waiting to be called in by the KGB for his activities surrounding the magazine, he found a summons from them in his mailbox.

Alyona wasn’t feeling well. She suspected she might be pregnant, but she decided not to tell Mikha for the time being. She had been silent for days, which was not unusual for her. He, on the other hand, talked nonstop: about Edik, about the lawyer some friends had found, about the magazine, old version and new, about Sanya Steklov, who had suddenly turned up and invited them to the Conservatory, though they hadn’t heard a word from him in six months …

He babbled on about everything under the sun, but didn’t say a word about the summons from the KGB in the pocket of his checked shirt.

There were two possible reasons that they wanted to see him. One was that they had given Doctor Zhivago a good shake, and the piece of paper with the Tatar demographics fell out; the other was that Edik had informed on him as an accomplice, which seemed improbable to Mikha.

He was not vexed by the summons. What he felt was closer to embarrassment that he had managed to do so little: nothing, really! He had only written a few articles, and selected and edited some poetry.

When he told Ilya about the summons, Ilya was very upset.

“It was to be expected. I was actually surprised that they had left you alone for so long. And I’m at fault for dragging you into this magazine business. We’ll have to figure out how to extricate you from it now. Edik has a strong character, I don’t think he’d set you up. They’re going to put you through the wringer for those Tatar statistics. You’ve got to think up a good alibi—you bought Zhivago a long time ago from a street vendor, because you’d heard a lot about it. But you hadn’t had time to read it, or even look at it, yet. You don’t know anything about any sheet of paper covered with numbers. And anyone in Moscow can buy the book near the secondhand bookshop on Kuznetsky Bridge; by Pervopechatnik there are street vendors, and it’s even easier at Ptichka, by the entrance. And describe the guy who sold it to you in detail. Say he had long hair, with greasy long locks hanging down from the sides of his head, and a really long nose that reached right down to his lip. And black eyes. And he spoke with a Ukrainian accent. And he wore a vest with spangles…” Ilya looked at his friend searchingly. “Or, let’s say, he was really small, with curly hair and curly sideburns. He had a down-turned nose, light-colored eyes, and small, womanish hands … and he spoke with a burr. Or how about this: He was a nervous, high-strung type, skinny, rather tall, yellowish, with a high, balding forehead, a scraggly beard. And he seemed to walk like a wind-up toy…”

Then Mikha jumped in:

“No, he was a big, burly guy with a massive beard, dressed like a peasant. And a mustache. I’d say he was kind of a slob; an old-timer. And he carried his books in a sack, and wore felt boots with galoshes over them! A giant of a man, indeed!”

They were almost rolling on the floor in laughter.

“No, a woman would be better. A tall, elderly, buxom lady, aristocratic-looking. Wearing a hat and carrying an umbrella. She took the book out of her handbag, and she was wearing gloves. And the strange thing was that it looked like she was wearing them on the wrong hands … The gloves are what made me remember her…” Mikha was getting completely carried away by the game.

“Well, Mikha, what can I say to you? Just say no to everything they ask you. That’s the best way to deal with the situation. I know from experience.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Yes. But I got out. The best thing is not to say anything at all. Remember, every word you say will work against you. No matter what it is. We’re just amateurs—they’re professionals. They have their methods, and they know how to make you take the bait, how to trip you up. The best thing is not to talk. But I’ve heard from other people that this is nearly impossible. They could make a deaf-mute talk.”

The mention of a “deaf-mute” seemed to sear Mikha. It was January. For three years in a row he had been with the boarding-school kids, with his deaf-and-dumb children, during these deep-winter days. They had gone cross-country skiing, first departing from the school gates and walking about a hundred yards into the forest, where a ski track had been made the night before. Usually he went first, followed by the children, with Gleb Ivanovich bringing up the rear. How long had it been since he’d visited them? A year? Two? Suddenly, he wanted desperately to see them. It was urgent. And he spontaneously signed the word to himself with his hands—urgent!

He didn’t say anything to Ilya. There were still two days until Monday, and he decided that on Sunday morning he would get up early and go to the boarding school to spend the day with the children. After all, they let parents visit. He had worked with them for three years. Who would dare try to stop him?

They arrested Mikha at Yaroslav Station when he was getting on the commuter train. He already had one foot in the train when two men yanked him off so adroitly that it seemed at first as if he had stumbled and fallen off the steps himself.

“Easy now, keep quiet!” one of them, wearing a rabbit-fur cap, barked in his ear.

“Quiet—if you know what’s good for you!” said the second one, wearing nutria.

Mikha had a cold. He wanted to reach into his pocket for a handkerchief, and he jerked his hand. He felt a sharp pain in his wrist.

Only then did he understand fully what had happened to him: they were afraid he would take to his heels, so they had intercepted him. That meant they had been following him.

He sniffed loudly.

“Let me just wipe my snot,” he said, and laughed.

“You’re fine the way you are!” roared the rabbit-fur hat again.

“What do you need with a snot-nosed wimp?” Mikha said, and seemed to grow completely calm, even apathetic. He was under arrest.

* * *

The first days were the hardest. He was determined to carry out to the letter all of Ilya’s urgings. On the third day they charged him, and he realized it was all over. The mousetrap had snapped shut, and he couldn’t get out. He fell into a depression then. All his thoughts were with Alyona, and an enormous sense of guilt, one he had known since childhood, gripped him. He didn’t know how she was; he had no connection at all to his life outside prison. The first familiar face he saw, in the second week, was the pale, haggard face of Edik Tolmachev.

They hadn’t agreed on a common strategy, but their actions in prison coincided remarkably. Edik denied Mikha’s participation in the magazine, Mikha refused to answer any questions at all. The only evidence they had against Mikha was the sheet of paper in the volume of Doctor Zhivago, or, more precisely, Musa’s addendum at the bottom addressed to “Red.”

It turned out that this was enough. Besides Edik Tolmachev, two more people, whom Mikha truly didn’t know, had been brought in about the case of the unsanctioned journal Gamayun. Despite some shortcomings in his management, Edik knew the basics of conspiracy—not all the participants in the publication of the magazine knew one another.

The investigation and preparation for the trial took a little over three months. Mikha was held in a KGB detention cell in Lefortovo Prison, in the most secret and cut-off quarters—a whitewashed cell with a sealed-off window that blocked out all light, and the outside world. Every day, to the sound of a metallic clip-clop, clip-clop, the guard would lead him down the long, labyrinthine corridors, and up and down narrow stairways, where one could only walk in single file. Twice, when they met a prisoner being led toward them from the other direction, they shoved Mikha into a recess, like a side closet. Then they resumed their journey through the tangle of nightmarish, seemingly endless corridors, until, finally, they deposited him in the investigator’s office. Now the interrogators didn’t alternate. There was just one heavyset, gloomy officer, who always began their hours-long interaction with the words:

“So, are we still refusing to speak?”

He had absolutely no imagination, and always repeated, in the same soft, hoarse voice:

“We don’t have anything on you. You could be out of here tomorrow. You’re pushing up the length of your own term. We want to get rid of you.”

Mikha repeated, in a bored monotone:

“I even address my young students with the formal ‘you.’ Please be so good as to address me the same way.”

The investigator’s name was Meloedov. Mikha, with his keen ear, was immediately alert to the echo in their names: Meloedov and Melamid. But apart from the first two syllables of their surnames, they had nothing in common. True, Meloedov was no man-eating monster. He even had the reputation, in his own circles, of being almost a liberal (among those who knew words like that, at least). And, to the investigator, this redheaded fellow seemed at first like a chance character who had wandered into the wrong play. His dossier contained Gleb Ivanovich’s already old denunciation, and a piece of paper of indeterminate origin, testifying to his links to the Tatar right-of-return movement. Article 70—agitation and propaganda—was clearly not relevant here. And Article 190—the distribution of intentionally false information harmful to the Soviet authorities—would have to be proved, before it was imputed to him. A single denunciation by a single loony was a bit flimsy as evidence. Moreover, the fellow’s defense wasn’t half bad.

Mikha had no way of knowing that the decision to isolate him had been made beforehand, and that the powers-that-be were leisurely trying to come up with a case they could slap on him.

Finally, the decision came down from above, and the interrogation became more pointed and expedient, and Mikha realized that the case they were building was not related to the journal activities. Rather, the focus had been narrowed to his involvement with the Crimean Tatars. By this time, Edik had already been sentenced.

Mikha did not give any testimony, didn’t sign anything, and answered some mundane, insignificant questions, and only off the record. He was amiable enough, but he firmly denied having any part in the right-to-return movement, and insisted that he knew nothing about the Tatar demographics paper.

Meloedov, certain at first that it wouldn’t take much to make Melamid talk, grew progressively more agitated at Mikha’s recalcitrance, and resorted to ever more convincing threats. He raged and fumed at Mikha’s stubbornness, but nothing could make him give evidence. And to think that at first the investigator thought it would be enough to scare him a little, give him a light kick in the behind …

By the end of the month, Meloedov had left Mikha in peace and stopped calling him in for questioning. The interest of the investigative committee had shifted to the Tatars. One of them revealed that Mikha had helped them to write letters.

But Mikha knew nothing of this. Now he shared the cell with two other men. One of them was completely mad, and constantly muttered either prayers or curses under his breath. The other was a discharged military man, a procurement officer who had been caught stealing. These cellmates inspired no desire to socialize.

Then they transferred him to another cell, which he shared with a Tatar who was involved with the Crimean Tatar movement. It turned out that he was friends with Mikha’s acquaintances Ravil and Musa. It was only on the third day, when they removed the Tatar from Mikha’s cell, that Mikha realized he had been planted there. He was an informer. Now Mikha was even more adamant about not saying another word. After some time, Meloedov started calling him in for questioning again; now Mikha really did keep silent, like a deaf-mute.

In the middle of February, Mikha was formally charged, and he was allowed to see a lawyer. The lawyer was one of their own, not someone assigned by the state. Sergei Borisovich had seen to this. Her name was Dina Arkadievna, and she had the first intelligent and attractive face he had seen in a long time. She took a chocolate bar out of her pocket and said:

“Alyona says hello. And there’s another piece of good news: Alyona’s pregnant. She’s feeling fine. Now we’ll try to figure out how we can get you home before the baby is born. Eat the chocolate here. I’m not allowed to give you anything.”

She was one of the lawyers who took on political cases—the “magnificent five.” This was the third trial of its kind. It was also the trial that got her kicked out of the Collegium of Moscow Attorneys. After the prosecutor’s statement demanding the application of Article 190, Part 1, of the Penal Code—the dissemination of false information defaming the Soviet authorities—she committed the rash act of not requesting that the sentence be reduced, instead insisting on the absence of grounds for indictment. In other words, she claimed the defendant was innocent.

Alyona, whose face had grown thinner as her belly grew, was sitting in the last row of the small, packed courtroom. On her right was her mother, Valentina, and on her left, Igor Chetverikov, one of Mikha’s classmates from school, though not a close friend. Ilya and Sanya, along with many others, were not allowed into the courtroom, and stood outside the door.

Marlen, who was also present in the crowd outside the door, his face contorted with helpless anger, whispered fiercely in Ilya’s ear:

“He’s simply mad! What was he thinking? It’s just beyond me! Why the Tatars? Why the Crimea? He should have been thinking about himself! For a Jew to get mixed up in the right of return of the Crimean Tatars! He should have been organizing his own right of return to Israel!”

Mikha was sentenced to three years in a medium-security prison camp, after which he was allowed to make a final statement. He spoke better than the judge, the prosecutor, and the lawyer put together. In a clear, rather high voice, calm and confident, he spoke about the justice that would ultimately prevail in society, in the world; about those who would feel ashamed of themselves; about the grandchildren of people alive today who would find it hard to believe the cruelty and senselessness of the past. What a wonderful literature teacher he made, and how unfortunate that the deaf schoolchildren had been deprived of his rare gifts!

After the trial, Alyona’s parents took her home to their house. She spent two days there, quarreled with her father, then returned to Chistoprudny Boulevard.

Sanya, who turned up at Alyona’s on the day he found out about Mikha’s arrest, went to see her every day now. The years of mutual coolness in his relations with Mikha seemed to have evaporated overnight. Their friendship, it turned out, was alive and well, and didn’t require any special nourishment in the form of frequent telephone calls, status reports, or drinking beer together.

A week after Mikha’s arrest Ilya and Sanya were sitting one evening in Milyutin Park on the bench with two broken slats. Sanya stared at the toes of his boots: Should he say it or not? Either way it was lame; but not saying anything at all was wrong. He said it, without looking at Ilya’s face.

“Ilya, you’re the reason Mikha’s in prison, you know.”

Ilya spat out defensively: “What are you talking about! Are you nuts?”

“You tempted him. Don’t you remember what it says in Matthew about causing the little ones to stumble?”

“No!” Ilya insisted. “We’re all adults, aren’t we? Well, aren’t we?”

But in his heart of hearts he felt uneasy. He was the one, after all, who had introduced Mikha to Edik, and he was responsible for what had happened in an indirect sense. But only indirectly!

* * *

The vindictive Meloedov did everything in his power to prevent Mikha from seeing his wife before being sent away under armed guard to the prison camp. Only the persistence of his father-in-law, an experienced ex-con himself, who managed to get an appointment with the deputy security officer of the prison, foiled in the end the machinations of the investigator.

On the eve of his departure, Mikha was granted a meeting with his wife. She had grown plainer, as some pregnant women do, especially (according to folk legend) if she’s carrying a girl. To Mikha, her beauty was angelic, but he was unable to express what was boiling and seething inside him. He was unable because of his habitual, innate sense of profound guilt toward every living being, which was magnified even more by the circumstances. The only thing he managed to say was some sort of nonsense that sounded like Dostoevsky: “I am guilty for everyone, for everything, before all people…”

That was what he was feeling as he left under convoy to the prison camp: guilty, guilty for all that had happened … Guilty before Alyona, since he had left her alone; before his friends, for not being able to do anything that would change the disposition of things for the better; before the whole world, to which he was indebted …

It’s a strange, inexplicable law that the most innocent people among us are the ones predisposed to the greatest sense of guilt.