Ice Trilogy Read online

  My heart trembled joyously: I had another brother, Ig!

  I moaned with joy, closed my eyes, and smiled in the darkness. My heart began to search for Fer. The thick brick walls were no impediment: Fer was nearby, in the cell. We began to talk. And we felt very good...

  A few days passed.

  I was woken by the scraping of the locks. The door opened and the warden jerked his head: “Out.”

  I left the cell. And soon I stood in the office of the director of investigations, Kagan. Small, swarthy, with a cruel and intelligent face, he started asking me questions about what happened. I realized that I shouldn’t tell him the truth. Therefore I said that Deribas was interrogating us, then he had an epileptic fit, he fell and hit his chest on the table. And we tried to help him. This answer, strange as it seemed, satisfied Kagan. Turning a sharpened pencil in his hands, he pressed a button, ringing a bell.

  I was sent to the general cell.

  And a few days later Fer and I were taken to the hospital where Ig lay. At the entrance to a separate ward sat a guard wearing a white doctor’s robe over his tunic. He opened the door and let us into the spacious, light room. Ig lay on the only bed in the room. He had turned almost completely gray. His face shone with inexpressible joy. We ran to him, embraced him. And he began to sob from happiness. Our hearts began to touch his awakening heart. It was so young! Ig quivered and cried.

  We spoke the first words to the awakening heart.

  A large, red-cheeked woman doctor came in.

  Seeing us embracing the crying Ig, she broke into a smile.

  “So these are your relatives, Comrade Deribas?”

  Ig nodded.

  She placed a glass of medicine on the stool and sighed, her large breasts heaving.

  “What great happiness it is to find your dear kin on earth.”

  We completely agreed with her.

  We were freed the same day, and Ig’s assistant, the Chekist Zapadny, congratulated us: in the department everyone already knew that Deribas, who had lost his family in the Civil War, had found a sister and brother. The witnesses of our talk about the Ice and a secret mission were told that, trying to get to Krasnoyarsk, we had eaten virtually nothing (this was true!), which meant that we were slightly “touched in the head” by the time we arrived. Congratulating us, the broad-faced Chekist Zapadny apologized for the “laying on of hands” and the “forced lack of hospitality.”

  “Gracious, you really do look a lot like our Terenty Dmitrich!” he admitted to us quite sincerely.

  “Well, of course: blue eyes!” I thought secretly and joyously.

  They gave us quarters in the OGPU dormitory.

  Ig left the hospital three days later. The doctors diagnosed him with “extreme exhaustion and stress, causing a deep loss of consciousness with features of a quasi-epileptic seizure.” From Moscow came Yagoda’s directive: send Deribas on vacation to regain his health. The chairman of the OGPU of the USSR loved and valued “the ferocious Deribas, whose iron hand had brought order to the Far East.”

  In Khabarovsk, Ig occupied a lovely house on Amursky Boulevard. His former wife and son stayed in Moscow, and here he was living with an actress of the Dramatic Theater. In Ig’s home we once again met alone, just the three of us. Ig had recovered, his chest was healing, and his heart had begun to live. In the small but cozy living room we started a fire in the fireplace, drew the drapes, threw off our pitiful human clothes, lowered ourselves onto the rug, and froze in an embrace.

  Time stopped for us.

  When we awoke, for the first time since we met, Fer and I were able to eat our fill of fruit, which was plentiful in Ig’s house. The head of the regional OGPU sent Crimean grapes and peaches, Astrakhan watermelons and plums, pears and mandarin oranges from the Caucasus. Ig enjoyed watching how, our naked bodies illuminated by the flames from the fireplace, we enjoyed the fruit, us. He resembled an infant learning to walk. Once cruel and implacable, seeing life as an unending, ruthless struggle, it was as though he had crawled out of his old, steel armor, riddled with bloody spikes, and now, soft and defenseless, was taking his first step.

  Our hearts gently touched his.

  Fer and I told our newly acquired brother about our lives. And he told us about his. The life of forty-five-year-old Terenty Deribas had followed a path marked by the sign of Eternal Struggle: a peasant childhood in a remote village, then the town trade school, a working-class factory milieu, an illegal group of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the romanticism of the revolutionary underground, belief in a bright future, leaflets and proselytizing, Russian Marxism, arrest, exile, escape, again arrest, again exile, Revolution, workers’ brigades, an inborn ability to lead, to infect people with his own anger and bend them to his will, the Civil War, becoming commissar first of a regiment, then a division, afterward came the army, victory over the Whites, experience and authority, a position in the All-Russian Cheka, ruthlessness toward remaining enemies, Lenin’s personal gratitude, steadfastness and cruelty, absolute loyalty to the Party, the position of director of the OGPU’s Secret Department, member of the collegiums of the OGPU, and then — ambassador plenipotentiary of the OGPU for the Far East.

  During the war and later, Deribas had personally shot dozens of people; thousands were executed on his orders. For the Bolsheviks he was an ideal machine of suppression and destruction.

  When the Ice hammer struck him in the chest, Deribas died.

  And Ig appeared on earth. And became our brother.

  He told us an amazing story. In 1908 he was living in exile again in western Siberia, in a little village on the banks of the great Irtysh River. He was waiting for winter, when the Irtysh would freeze and it would be possible to make a deal with a driver and escape over the ice to Omsk on a sleigh. At the end of June he had a dream: he dreamed about his grandfather, Yerofei Deribas. In his dream his grandfather’s entire body was made of ice — his head, his crooked cavalry legs, and the stump of his right arm, lost during the war with the Turks. His grandfather was sitting at a new table that still smelled of freshly planed wood, in a newly built cottage of the Deribases’, in the very same settlement, Uspensk, where Terenty had been born and grown up. In the middle of the table lay a roasted pig head. Seven-year-old Teresha sat across from his grandfather. Grandfather cut off pieces of the hot, steaming pork with his only, and extremely deft, left hand, and offered a piece to each member of the family, along with a humorous remark. Everyone was laughing and eating the pork with a good appetite. Terenty felt how delicious the meat smelled, he was very hungry; he drooled, he couldn’t wait any longer — he was terribly hungry. However, Grandfather was taking his time: the ice hand, armed with a knife, cut off another piece, handed it out, but again it was not for Terenty. While Grandfather told his joke, he held the warm pork in his hand; grease dripped from it in large drops. Finally everyone except little Terenty had received his piece and was eating the warm pork with relish. Grandfather himself was eating as well.

  “Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked.

  Grandfather ate and looked at Terenty with icy eyes.

  “Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked again, on the verge of tears.

  Quickly swallowing the last of his piece, Grandfather wiped his icy beard with his ice hand, burped, and said, “It ain’t needful for you.”

  Terenty’s face was contorted with hurt.

  “And what do I need?”

  “This is what,” Grandfather answered, and suddenly his icy fist slugged Terenty sharply and very painfully in the chest.

  After that blow, Terenty’s entire being understood that he needed the Ice.

  That night in Siberia, sleeping on the tile stove in his hut, Terenty was awakened by an enormous clap of thunder. The hut swayed. His chest hurt as though someone had actually hit him. And he sensed that his grandfather had died at that very moment. It was true: Grandfather Yerofei passed away the morning of June 30, 1908.

  Hearing the first story about t
he Ice from me on the train, he remembered his grandfather and the fantastical dream. At the same time he began to have the feeling that I had known his grandfather. That was why he had asked me about him so obsessively.

  Ig’s dream strengthened our faith in the power of the Ice. Each of our people had had dreams related to the Ice. And in this was the Great Wisdom of the Light.

  After catching up on sleep, we got ready to travel. The Chekist Deribas was supposed to go to a sanatorium on the Crimean shore of the Black Sea in order to regain his health. We traveled with him. We were given new documents with the celebrated surname Deribas: I became Alexander Dmitrievich, Fer was Anfisa Dmitrievna. We had to stop in Krasnoyarsk and find Rubu and Ep, so as to take them with us. We were worried about them — the OGPU was looking for Rubu. Furthermore, we had to preserve the remaining six pieces of Ice. Ig hid four pieces in his attic: it was cold there, and winters in Khabarovsk were very cold. He packed two pieces in wooden chests, closed them with the lead seals of the OGPU, and ordered that they be loaded onto the train. They were placed in the unheated space between the cars.

  At the end of October the train set off. Traveling in it were guards, a cook, a doctor, Deribas’s secretary, and us. It was already winter in eastern Siberia — the snow lay on the hillocks that swam past the windows and it swirled around the cars. The train with a red star on the nose of the locomotive rushed toward the west. The wheels clacked along the frozen rails of the Trans-Siberian. The three of us sat in Deribas’s compartment and talked about the future. A very significant endeavor awaited us. The endeavor of our lives. We stood at the beginning of the great road to the Light. It was important not to make any mistakes, not to act in haste. Neither did we have the right to move too slowly.

  There were only five of us, five awakened hearts. There remained 22,995 brothers and sisters scattered about the complex world of this planet. They lived in different countries and spoke different languages, unaware of the Great Kinship, knowing nothing about their true nature. Their hearts slept, pumping blood like wordless machines in the corporeal darkness. Then they wore out, grew old, and stopped. And they were buried in the earth. But the Light, on leaving the dying heart, immediately passed to the heart of a newborn person, making him our brother. And this tiny heart began to pump blood again in the darkness of an infant body.

  We had to break this vicious cycle. By means of the Ice hammer we had to separate the Divine Light from vile, short-lived flesh.

  Our hearts burned with passion.

  But passion alone was not much. We had to begin a long, persistent war against humankind for our brothers and sisters. This required huge resources. In order to sift through the human race, searching for the golden grain of our Brotherhood, we had to control this race.

  Money provided power in the world of people. But in Soviet Russia money didn’t play the same role as in the rest of the world. In a country living under the red flag with the hammer and sickle, only the state wielded absolute power. In order to achieve success in Russia, we would have to become part of the state machine, take cover under it, and, wearing the uniforms of officialdom, go about achieving our goal. There was no other way. Any secret society existing outside of the totalitarian state was doomed. We couldn’t allow ourselves to become underground members of a secret order, hiding in the dark corners under the hierarchical ladder of power. That road led only to the torture chambers of the OGPU and the Stalinist camps. We had to clamber up this ladder and stand solidly on it. Then the difficult and painstaking process of searching for our people would possess the necessary protection. The fellowship had to enter the power structure. We had to make our way through its thick skin. In order to search for our brothers and sisters.

  That was what our heads decided.

  That was what our wise hearts prompted us to do.

  So we began the search. We decided to stop in every large town. And we did. The train stopped in Chita. Ig called his secretary and right before our eyes climbed easily back into the steel armor of the Far East’s top Chekist. With others he again became Deribas, ruthless and principled, the guard dog of the Revolution. He ordered his secretary to bring the head of the local OGPU. When the boss, perplexed, climbed into the car, Deribas ordered him to provide us with a car, a driver, and a Chekist escort. Fer and I drove around the city in the car. Our heart magnet began to work. We were looking. Stopping on the streets, we went into markets and stores, into Soviet organizations and barracks. All day we moved around the cozy, two-story town of Chita, surrounded by mountains, white with snow. But our hearts were silent: there were none of us in Chita. Exhausted and despairing from the heart’s anticipation, I decided that we should return to the train station. On the way back I realized just how widely we were scattered among humans: in a town with a population of forty thousand, there wasn’t a single one of us! Fer’s heart, and mine, appreciated the miraculous and rapid acquisition of three brothers. The Light living in our hearts helped us.

  Arriving at the small square in front of the station, strewn with cigarette butts and pine-nut shells, we began to get out of the car. And suddenly our hearts felt a jolt. Somewhere nearby a flute sounded plaintively. Fer looked around. Her heart felt our presence more powerfully than mine. Like a sleepwalker, she moved across the square, bumping into idlers and passengers waiting for the trains. I followed her. The Chekist, not understanding whom we had been searching for so intensely all day, stood by the car and smoked. As I walked, my heart began to tremble. The feeling got stronger and stronger. My eyes, watching Fer’s back, clouded with tears. How I loved my sister at such fateful moments! She led me. And our hearts called out to each other.

  Fer stopped short. I almost ran into her.

  On a wooden box, there sat an intelligent-looking, middle-aged man dressed in a once-expensive but now tattered dirty coat with a soiled Arctic-fox fur collar. He was playing the flute. A cracked pince-nez trembled on his long, hooked nose. His reddish mustache was covered in frost. His light-blue eyes looked vacantly doomed: this man no longer had anything to lose. There were holes in his old gray felt boots. He was playing something plaintive and mournful.

  We stood stock-still in front of him.

  Our hearts trembled: he was our brother!

  His sleeping heart could feel the power of the Light, which flared in our hearts, for the first time. The melody stopped abruptly. Our brother raised his eyes. They met with ours. His pince-nez trembled, his eyes widened in horror. He raised his flute to fend us off, and fell from the box. He cried out hoarsely, “Nooooooo!”

  We lifted him under his arms. He wailed in a raspy, congested voice and tried weakly to break loose. His terror wasn’t a sham: his delicate, emaciated face paled, and a spasm ran through the muscles of his mouth.

  “Noooo! No! Noooo!” he wailed, writhing in our hands.

  People looked at us with curiosity. The Chekist ran over.

  “We were looking for him!” I informed the Chekist with a voice breaking with joy.

  “I know this guy, the rat!” the Chekist grabbed the station musician by his collar. “White scum! Come on then, you, enough pretending!”

  The three of us dragged the struggling musician to the platform where our red-nosed train stood. Along the way the musician lost consciousness. The flute fell from his stiff fingers. But we didn’t pick it up. What would he need a flute for now? Joy burst from our hearts. We wanted to laugh, squeal, and roar from happiness.

  “This cockroach here played in the White’s orchestra,” the Chekist muttered. “They didn’t knock him off, felt sorry for the turd: after all, he’s a musician...Comrade Babich told him to stay away from Chita — ‘Don’t let me hear there’s a trace of you in town, you piece of White shit’ — but no, he had to crawl back, the scoundrel. Were you looking for him for the old stuff?”

  “For new things!” I answered joyously.

  The Chekist remained silent.

  We carried the unconscious flautist into the main compartment; Der
ibas gave the command. And the train began to move. The local Chekists standing on the platform saluted. The city of Chita, which had presented us with a brother, swam past the window, away from us forever: there were no more of us there. Evening fell, in the two-story houses the windows lit up dimly. The snow-covered mountains hid the town.

  The guards brought the box with the Ice into the compartment. Then they left. Ig locked the door. His hand trembled with impatience. We opened the crate. We took the Ice and placed it on the floor. And, unable to restrain ourselves, grabbed it with our hands. Our hearts resonated with the Ice. Moans and cries burst from our lips.

  The musician moved and opened his eyes. He looked at us in terror.

  It was time to awaken our brother.

  “Don’t be afraid of anything,” I told him. “You are among the people closest to you.”

  He screamed like a wounded hare. Ig covered his mouth, tied it with a handkerchief. We began to undress the wandering musician. Under his coat was a woman’s old top, torn at the elbows; under that, a dirty tunic. It teemed with lice. His body was thin and hadn’t been washed for a long time, like a truly homeless man. He writhed in our hands and moaned weakly. Ig broke off the necessary piece of Ice with the handle of a revolver. Fer pulled the laces from her boots and looked around: in the corner of Deribas’s compartment stood a red flag. On Soviet holidays it was attached to the locomotive. Fer grabbed the flag and tore the faded red cloth from it. We tied the Ice to the stick; Ig lifted the moaning musician and pressed the man’s back to his own chest. I aimed at the thin, dirty chest bone, drew back, and struck it with the Ice hammer. The blow was so powerful that the musician and Ig toppled backward, tripped on the sofa, and fell. The stick broke, pieces of the Ice skittered all around. One of them cut Fer on the forehead above her eyebrow. The musician lost consciousness. Ig rushed to him and removed the gag from his mouth. He wasn’t breathing.