Ice Trilogy Page 15

  “Out!” he ordered.

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

  Everyone seated lit cigarettes.

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

  Everyone around the table looked at us. He continued.

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

  The Party functionaries laughed. The Chekists smoked calmly.

  “Who are you?” Deribas asked me.

  “I am Bro,” I answered honestly.

  “And you?” His gaze pierced Fer.

  “And I am Fer.”

  “Who sent you?”

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

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

  Deribas glanced at his companions. He winked at them.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Hmmm...” Deribas opened his whitened lips and grinned awkwardly. “These are the kinds of lunatics we have here in Siberia...this, uh...nowadays there are many, quite a few.”

  His joke didn’t work.

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

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

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

  “You...you...you’re an enemy.” he hissed.

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

  The Party people jumped up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Go on out, go on, Pyotr.”

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

  “You knew my grandfather?” he finally asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Then who told you about the ice?”

  “The Ice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We remained silent. But our magnet began speaking.

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

  His armor had cracked, ever so slightly.

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

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

  Deribas laughed nervously.

  “Seryozha!” he called.

  A young Chekist entered the compartment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I told him everything I knew about the Ice.

  He listened with a stony face, his eyes lowered.

  “This is what I’ve decided,” he said, his fingers trembling as he retrieved a cigarette. “Today I will send my people to the Stony Tungus, to the place where you buried your ice. They will bring it here in good condition. If there isn’t any ice there — I will personally shoot you.”

  We were taken away.

  In the cell I moaned and growled with excitement, frightening the “formers.” We had broken through the iron armor of Deribas! In the logic of the OGPU his order to make the expedition to the Katanga seemed complete madness. Any other Chekist of his rank would have had us tortured long ago, and then executed. The next day he would have forgotten about the madmen who talked about Ice flying in from outer space. And our bullet-pierced hearts would have happily allowed the worms inside.

  But our hearts had not awoken in order to make the worms happy. Their job was to awaken the sleeping. Our heart magnet was drawing in the “iron” Deribas, slowly but surely. The Chekist expedition returned in about two weeks. And the Chekists brought the Ice! The hearts in our bodies, locked in the underground, were overjoyed.

  We saw our Ice in Deribas’s office. One of the seven pieces lay on a silver tray. Deribas sat behind his desk. Over the last two weeks he had grown pinched and lost weight. In his light-chestnut hair and his slightly reddish beard, streaks of gray had appeared. Two bodyguards stood next to him: he was afraid.

  “You spoke the truth,” he said, lighting up and blowing out the smoke as though trying to shield himself from us. “They found the ice you buried. Seven pieces of it.”

  We approached the Ice and placed our hands on it.

  Deribas didn’t interfere. He sat with his eyes closed. He had lost himself completely. We were in bliss, speaking with the Ice.

  “And what...now?” Deribas muttered, as though asking himself.

  “Now order a simple stick and a strip of leather be brought here,” I said.

  Deribas lifted the telephone receiver. “Pospelov, bring me a simple stick and a strip of leather.”

  When the order had been carried out, I asked Deribas to remove the guards and lock the door. The guards didn’t look at us or him like madmen: the office of the head Chekist of the Far East had seen stranger things.

  Deribas ordered the guards to leave. Then he stood with difficulty and walked to the door. It was only about eight meters, but for him the distance became eight kilometers. I will never forget how this man walked, this man we had broken. Slumping, he could barely drag his legs in his squeaky boots. His head trembled, his mouth was half open, his strong peasant hands hung loose. He was literally dragging himself to the door. In order to lock it forever. And leave behind it the terrible world of people.

  Reaching the door, Deribas turned the key in the lock and leaned his forehead against the door.

  “I will...shoot you,” he whispered.

  But his weak hand couldn’t even reach his holster. His sluggish fingers clenched and unclenched. I turned him around sharply, his back to the door, unbuttoned his tunic, and ripped open his undershirt. There was no cross on his neck.

  Fer and I lifted the Ice and threw it on the floor. It cracked. We grabbed an appropriate piece, tied it with the leather to the stick. And approached Deribas. He passively waited for us. His heart waited.

  I swung back and struck him in the chest with the Ice hammer. He cried out briefly and, losing consciousness, began to fall on us. We caught him and laid him flat on his back on the floor. The blow had been strong: blood flowed from the broken breastbone. Deribas’s eyes rolled back, his body quiver
ed and jerked, as though he were having an epileptic fit.

  We waited for the awakening of the heart.

  It trembled. And suddenly stopped.

  Deribas stopped jerking. We froze. His face had turned deathly pale. His heart wasn’t beating.

  There was a knock at the door, and the voice of his secretary asked, “Comrade Deribas?”

  He felt that something had happened in the office. And immediately the phone on the table rang. Deribas lay before us, lifeless.

  “Comrade Deribas!” the secretary cried and knocked on the door.

  But Deribas answered neither us nor the humans.

  “Break down the door!” cried the secretary.

  The guards threw themselves at the door. I froze. Because I didn’t know what to do. And suddenly Fer clutched at his shoulders, shaking him.

  “Brother, speak with your heart! Little brother, our dear, sweet little brother, speak with your heart!”

  His heart didn’t answer.

  The door cracked.

  Fer lay on top of Deribas, embracing him. A piercing cry escaped her mouth. And I felt how her heart stirred our brother’s stopped heart.

  And his heart came to life.

  “Ig, Ig, Ig,” it spoke.

  We cried out for joy.

  The door flew open and the Chekists rushed into the office. But we didn’t notice them: our faces were pressed to the bloody chest, our heart caught the voice of the awoken heart, and our lips repeated the name of our brother.

  “Ig, Ig, Ig!”

  Someone hit me on the head with the handle of a revolver, and I lost consciousness.

  I came to in an isolation cell.

  It was almost dark: light pushed through the iron “muzzle” on the tiny cellar window. I lay on a wet floor. It smelled of human urine. I raised my head and touched it: there was a large lump on the back of my head, and my hair was sticky with dried blood. I rose carefully, holding on to the wall. My head spun slightly. But my heart beat evenly: as if it had been resting while I lay without consciousness. I looked around: there was nothing in the cell. I walked around carefully. My head hurt. I pressed it to the cool “muzzle.” And suddenly remembered everything.