Chapter 1. Arrest
How do people get to this mysterious Archipelago? Planes fly there every hour, ships sail there, trains thunder there—but not a single sign on them indicates the destination. And ticket agents, Intourist and Sovtourist agents, would be astonished if you asked them for a ticket there. They know nothing and have never heard of the Archipelago as a whole, or of any of its countless islands.
Those who go to govern the Archipelago—get there via the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) training schools. Those who go to guard the Archipelago—are conscripted through the military registration and enlistment offices. But those who go there to die, like you and me, reader, must get there only and compulsorily—via arrest.
Arrest! Shall I say that it is the turning point of your entire life? That it is a direct lightning strike into you? That it is an inexpressible spiritual upheaval, which not everyone can come to terms with, and often one slides into madness?
The universe has as many centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is the center of the universe, and the cosmos splits in two when they hiss at you: “You are arrested!”
If you are arrested—did anything else in this earthquake remain standing?
But with minds clouded, incapable of grasping these shifts in the cosmos, the most sophisticated and the most simple-minded among us can manage nothing else, at this moment, from the whole experience of life but: “—Me?? What for?!—” a question repeated millions upon millions of times before us, and which has never received an answer.
Arrest is an instant, stark transference, a toss, a lurch from one state to another.
Along the long curving street of our life, we happily dashed or unhappily plodded past fences, fences, fences—rotting wooden ones, adobe walls, brick, concrete, iron railings. We did not ponder—what is beyond them? Neither with our eyes nor with our understanding did we try to look behind them—and it is there that the country of the Gulag begins, quite near, two meters from us. And we still did not notice in those fences a countless number of tightly fitting, well-camouflaged little doors, wickets. All, all these wickets were prepared for us!—and now the fateful one swings open quickly, and four white male hands, unused to labor, but grasping, seize us by the leg, by the arm, by the collar, by the hat, by the ear—drag us in like a sack, and the wicket behind us, the wicket to our past life, is slammed shut forever.
That’s it. You are arrested! And you can find nothing to say to this but a lamb’s bleating: “—Me-e?? What for??..”
That is what arrest is: a blinding flash and a blow, from which the present instantly shifts into the past, and the impossible becomes the fully-fledged present.
And that’s all. And you are unable to grasp anything more, neither in the first hour nor even in the first twenty-four hours.
The circus toy moon will still flicker for you in your despair: “It’s a mistake! They’ll sort it out!”
All the rest, which has now formed the traditional and even literary idea of arrest, will accumulate and build up not in your bewildered memory, but in the memory of your family and apartment neighbors.
It is—the sharp night bell or the coarse knock on the door. It is—the valiant entrance of the non-wiping boots of the vigilant operatives. It is—behind their backs, the frightened, subdued witness. (And why this witness? The victims dare not think, the operatives do not remember, but it is required by instruction, and he must sit all night, and sign in the morning. And for the witness dragged out of bed, this too is torture: night after night to go and help arrest one’s neighbors and acquaintances).
The traditional arrest is also the hurried gathering by trembling hands for the one being led away: a change of linen, a piece of soap, some food, and no one knows what is needed, what is allowed, and how best to dress, and the operatives hurry and cut them off: “Nothing is needed. They’ll feed you there. It’s warm there.” (All lies. And they hurry—to instill fear.)
The traditional arrest is also, later, after the poor wretch has been taken away, the hours-long domination of the apartment by a harsh, alien, overwhelming force. It is—the breaking, the forcing open, the knocking off and tearing down from the walls, the throwing onto the floor from cupboards and tables, the shaking out, scattering, tearing apart—and the heaps of mess on the floor, and the crunching under boots. And nothing is sacred during the search! When the railway engineer Inoshin was arrested, a small coffin with his recently deceased child stood in the room. The jurists threw the child out of the coffin; they searched there too. They shake the sick out of bed, and unbind bandages. And nothing during the search can be declared absurd! They seized from the antiquity lover Chetvertukhin “so many sheets of tsarist decrees”—specifically, a decree on the end of the war with Napoleon, on the formation of the Holy Alliance, and a prayer service against the cholera of 1830. Our best Tibet specialist Vostrikov had priceless ancient Tibetan manuscripts confiscated (and the deceased’s students barely managed to wrest them back from the KGB 30 years later!). When the orientalist Nevsky was arrested, Tangut manuscripts were taken (and 25 years later, the deceased was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for deciphering them). They swept up Karger’s archive of the Yenisei Ostyaks, banned the alphabet and primer he invented—and the small nation was left without a written language. To describe all this in intelligent language is lengthy, but the people say about the search: they are looking for what they didn’t put there.
What is seized is taken away, and sometimes the arrested person is made to carry it himself—just as Nina Aleksandrovna Palchinskaya carried on her shoulder a sack of papers and letters belonging to her perpetually active late husband, a great engineer of Russia—into THEIR jaws, forever, without return.
And for those remaining after the arrest—a long tail of life overturned and devastated. And the attempt to go with parcels. But from every window, barking voices: “no such person listed,” “he is not here!” And at that window in the grim days of Leningrad, one still had to queue for five days. And only perhaps after half a year or a year will the arrested person call out, or they will throw out: “Without the right of correspondence.” And that already means—forever. “Without the right of correspondence”—is almost certainly: shot.
This is how we imagine arrest.
And indeed, the night arrest of the described type is a favorite here, because it has important advantages. Everyone living in the apartment is constricted by terror from the very first knock on the door. The one being arrested is torn from the warmth of bed; he is still entirely in semi-sleep helplessness; his reason is clouded. In a night arrest, the operatives have the advantage in force: several armed men arrive against one, who hasn’t fastened his trousers; during the time of gathering and searching, a crowd of possible supporters of the victim will certainly not gather at the entrance. The unhurried gradualness of arrival at one apartment, then another, tomorrow a third and a fourth, makes it possible to properly utilize the operational staff and imprison many times more city residents than that staff comprises.
And there is also the virtue of night arrests that neither neighboring houses nor city streets see how many were taken away overnight. Having frightened the closest neighbors, they are not an event for those farther away. It is as if they never happened. Along the very asphalt strip where the Black Marias scurried at night—by day, a young generation marches with banners and flowers and sings unclouded songs.
But for the takers, whose service consists solely of arrests, for whom the horrors of the arrested are repetitive and tedious, their understanding of the arrest operation is much wider. They have a big theory, one must not think in simplicity that they do not. Arrest-knowledge is an important section of the course of general penology, and it is underpinned by a solid social theory. Arrests are classified by various signs: night and day; domestic, official, en route; primary and repeated; fragmented and group. Arrests differ in the degree of required unexpectedness, in the degree of expected resistance (but in tens of millions of cases, no resistance was expected, and none occurred). Arrests differ in the seriousness of the required search; in the necessity of making or not making an inventory for confiscation, of sealing the rooms or apartment; in the necessity of arresting the wife following the husband, and sending the children to an orphanage, or the entire remaining family to exile, or even the elderly to the camp.
No, no, arrests are very diverse in form. Irma Mendel, a Hungarian woman, once got two tickets to the Bolshoi Theater, in the front rows, from the Comintern (1926). Investigator Klyugel was courting her, and she invited him. They spent the entire performance very tenderly, and afterwards, he drove her… straight to the Lubyanka. And if, on a blossoming June day in 1927, on Kuznetsky Most, a handsome, rosy-cheeked, fair-haired woman, Anna Skripnikova, who had just bought blue fabric for a dress, is helped into a cab by some young dandy (and the cabman already understands and frowns: the Organs will not pay him)—then know that this is not a romantic rendezvous, but also an arrest: they will now turn onto the Lubyanka and drive into the black maw of the gates. And if (twenty-two springs later) Captain Lieutenant Boris Burkovsky, in a white tunic, smelling of expensive cologne, is buying a cake for a girl—don’t swear that this cake will go to the girl, and not be sliced up by searching knives and taken by the Captain Lieutenant into his first cell. No, a daytime arrest, an arrest en route, and an arrest in a bustling crowd were never neglected here. However, it is carried out cleanly and—this is amazing!—the victims themselves, in agreement with the operatives, behave as nobly as possible, so as not to let the living notice the doomed person’s demise.
Not everyone can be arrested at home with a preliminary knock on the door (and if someone does knock, it’s “the building manager, the postman”); not everyone should be arrested at work either. If the arrested person is cunning, it is convenient to take him in isolation from his usual surroundings—from his family, colleagues, associates, from hiding places: he must not have time to destroy, hide, or transmit anything. High-ranking officials, military or party, were sometimes first given a new assignment, a private railway carriage was provided, and they were arrested en route. Some unknown mortal, frozen with fear from the mass arrests and already depressed for a week by the suspicious glances of his superiors—is suddenly called to the local committee, where they, beaming, present him with a voucher to the Sochi sanatorium. The rabbit is moved—it means his fears were in vain. He thanks them, he joyfully rushes home to pack his suitcase. Two hours until the train, he scolds his slow wife. Here is the station! Still time. In the passenger lounge or at the beer counter, a most charming young man calls out to him: “Don’t you recognize me, Pyotr Ivanovich?” Pyotr Ivanovich is at a loss: “I don’t think so, although…” The young man overflows with such friendly disposition: “Well, of course, of course, I’ll remind you…” and respectfully bows to Pyotr Ivanovich’s wife: “Excuse me, your husband for just one minute…” His wife consents, the stranger leads Pyotr Ivanovich confidently by the arm—forever, or for ten years!
And the station swarms around—and notices nothing… Citizens who love to travel! Do not forget that at every station there is a GPU department and several prison cells.
This intrusiveness of supposed acquaintances is so sharp that a person without a camp-wolf background somehow cannot shake it off. Do not think that if you are an employee of the American embassy named, for example, Al-r D., you cannot be arrested in broad daylight on Gorky Street near the central telegraph office. Your unfamiliar friend will rush up to you through the crowd, throwing open his grasping arms: “Sa-sha!—he doesn’t hide it, he just shouts. —Keryukha! How many years, how many winters?!.. Well, let’s step aside so as not to bother people.” And right on the side, at the edge of the sidewalk, a “Pobeda” car has just pulled up… (A few days later, TASS will angrily declare in all newspapers that competent circles know nothing about the disappearance of Al-r D.). But what’s clever about that? Our lads made such arrests in Brussels (that’s how Zhora Blednov was taken), let alone in Moscow.
We must give the Organs their due: in an age when orators’ speeches, theatrical plays, and women’s fashions seem to come off an assembly line—arrests can seem diverse. You are led aside at the factory gate after you have presented your pass—and you are taken; you are taken from a military hospital with a temperature of 39 (Ans Bernstein), and the doctor does not object to your arrest (he would dare to object); you are taken straight from the operating table, undergoing a stomach ulcer operation (N. M. Vorobyov, inspector of the regional public education department, 1936)—and barely alive, covered in blood, you are brought to a cell (Karpunich recalls); you (Nadya Levitskaya) manage to secure a meeting with your convicted mother, and they give it to you!—and it turns out to be a confrontation and an arrest! You are invited to the order department in a “Gastronome” and arrested there; you are arrested by a wanderer who stopped at your place for the night for Christ’s sake; you are arrested by the repairman who came to read the meter; you are arrested by a cyclist who bumped into you on the street; a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank clerk, and a cinema administrator—they all arrest you, and belatedly you see the deeply hidden burgundy identification card.
Sometimes arrests even seem like a game—so much superfluous invention and well-fed energy is put into them, when the victim would not have resisted even without it. Are the operatives trying to justify their service and their numerousness this way? It seems sufficient to send subpoenas to all the designated rabbits—and they themselves will meekly appear with a small bundle at the black iron gates of state security at the appointed hour and minute, to occupy a section of the floor in the cell designated for them. (Indeed, collective farmers are taken that way; why go to his hut at night over bad roads? He is summoned to the village council, and taken there. A laborer is summoned to the office.)
Of course, every machine has its limit, beyond which it cannot go. In the strained, overflowing years of 1945–46, when trains kept arriving from Europe, and they all had to be immediately absorbed and sent to the Gulag—there was no longer this excessive game, the theory itself faded greatly, the ceremonial feathers fell off, and the arrest of tens of thousands looked like a meager roll call: they stood with lists, called out from one train, and put them on another, and that was the whole arrest.
The political arrests of several decades here were distinguished precisely by the fact that people who were completely innocent were seized, and therefore, unprepared for any resistance. A general feeling of doom was created, the idea (which, given our passport system, was quite accurate) that it was impossible to escape the GPU-NKVD. And even in the midst of the arrest epidemics, when people, leaving for work, said goodbye to their families every day, because they could not be sure they would return in the evening—even then they hardly ever fled (and in rare cases committed suicide). Which was exactly what was required. A meek sheep is an easy meal for the wolf.
This also stemmed from a misunderstanding of the mechanics of the arrest epidemics. The Organs often had no deep basis for choosing which person to arrest and which to leave alone, but merely reached a quota. Filling the quota could be systematic or accidental. In 1937, a woman came to the reception room of the Novocherkassk NKVD to ask what to do about the un-nursed baby of her arrested neighbor. “Sit down,” they told her, “we’ll find out.” She sat for about two hours—she was taken from the reception room and led to a cell: they urgently needed to fill a number, and they lacked the staff to send out across the city, and this one was already here! Conversely, the NKVD came to arrest the Latvian Andrei Pavel near Orsha; but he, without opening the door, jumped out the window, managed to escape, and went straight to Siberia. And although he lived there under his own name, and it was clear from documents that he was from Orsha, he was NEVER imprisoned, summoned to the Organs, or subjected to any suspicion. After all, there are three types of wanted lists: all-Union, republican, and regional, and a search above the regional level would not be announced for almost half of those arrested during those epidemics. A person slated for arrest due to accidental circumstances, like a neighbor’s denunciation, was easily replaced by another neighbor. Like A. Pavel, people who accidentally fell under a raid or into an apartment with an ambush and had the courage to flee in those same hours, even before the first interrogation—were never caught or charged; but those who stayed to await justice—received a sentence. And almost everyone, overwhelmingly, behaved precisely like this: faintheartedly, helplessly, doomedly.
It is also true that the NKVD, in the absence of the person they needed, took a signed pledge not to leave the town from relatives, and of course, it was no trouble at all to frame those remaining instead of the one who fled.
Universal innocence gives rise to universal inaction. Maybe they won’t take you yet? Maybe it will work out? A. I. Ladyzhensky was a leading teacher at a school in the backwater Kologriv. In ’37, a peasant approached him at the bazaar and passed on a message from someone: “Alexander Ivanych, leave, you’re on the lists!” But he stayed: the whole school depends on me, and their own children study with me—how can they take me?.. (He was arrested a few days later.) It is not given to everyone, like Vanya Levitsky, to understand at 14: “Every honest person must go to prison. Papa is in prison now, and when I grow up—they’ll put me in too.” (He was imprisoned at the age of twenty-three.) The majority persist in flickering hope. Since you are innocent—what can they take you for? IT’S A MISTAKE! You are already being dragged away by the scruff of your neck, and you still plead to yourself: “It’s a mistake! They’ll sort it out—they’ll release me!” They are arresting others en masse, that too is absurd, but in each of those cases, there is still some darkness: “but maybe that one is the one?..” but you!—you are certainly innocent! You still view the Organs as a humanly-logical institution: they’ll sort it out, they’ll release you.
And why should you flee then?.. And how can you resist then?.. You will only worsen your situation, you will hinder them from sorting out the mistake. Not just resisting—you even go down the stairs on tiptoe, as ordered, so that the neighbors won’t hear.
And then—what exactly should one resist? The taking of your belt? Or the order to step into the corner? Or to step over the threshold of the house? The arrest consists of small circumstances, numerous trifles—and not one of them individually seems worth arguing over (when the arrested person’s thoughts revolve around the great question: “What for?!”)—but all these circumstances together inevitably accumulate into an arrest.
And what feelings are not in the soul of the freshly arrested!—that alone is worth a book. There may be feelings we would not even suspect. When 19-year-old Evgenia Doyarenko was arrested in 1921, and three young Chekists rummaged through her bed, through her dresser with linen, she remained calm: there is nothing, they will find nothing. And suddenly, they touched her intimate diary, which she could not even show her mother—and the reading of her lines by hostile, alien lads struck her harder than all the Lubyanka with its bars and cellars. And for many, these personal feelings and attachments, struck by the arrest, can be much stronger than the fear of prison or political thoughts. A person internally unprepared for violence is always weaker than the perpetrator of violence.
Rare clever and brave individuals instantly grasp the situation. Grigoriev, the director of the geological institute of the Academy of Sciences, when they came to arrest him in 1948, barricaded himself and burned papers for two hours.
Sometimes the main feeling of the arrested person is relief and even… JOY, but this happened during the arrest epidemics: when those like you are being taken and taken all around, but they still don’t come for you, they keep delaying—that is exhaustion, that suffering is worse than any arrest, and not only for a weak soul. Vasily Vlasov, a fearless communist whom we will mention repeatedly, who refused the escape offered to him by his non-party assistants, was exhausted by the fact that the entire leadership of the Kadyi district was arrested (1937), but he still wasn’t taken, still wasn’t taken. He could only take the blow head-on—he took it and calmed down, and in the first days of arrest, he felt magnificent. —The priest Father Iraklis in 1934 went to Alma-Ata to visit exiled believers, and in the meantime, they came to arrest him. When he returned, the parishioners met him at the station and did not let him go home; they hid him from apartment to apartment for 8 years. The priest was so worn out by this hunted life that when he was finally arrested in 1942—he joyfully sang praises to God.
In this chapter, we speak all the time about the masses, about the rabbits imprisoned for reasons unknown. But we will yet touch upon those in the book who, even in the new era, remained genuinely political. Vera Rybakova, a Social-Democrat student, dreamed of the Suzdal isolation prison while free: only there did she expect to meet older comrades (none were left free) and there to develop her worldview. The Socialist Revolutionary Ekaterina Olitskaya in 1924 even considered herself unworthy of being imprisoned: the best people of Russia had gone through it, and she was still young and had done nothing for Russia yet. But freedom was already driving her out. So both of them went to prison—with pride and joy.
“Resistance! Where was your resistance?”—those who remained safe now scold those who suffered.
Yes, it should have begun here, at the very arrest.
It did not begin.
And now—you are being led. In a daytime arrest, there is inevitably that short, unique moment when you—implicitly, by cowardly agreement, or completely explicitly, with drawn pistols—are being led through a crowd among hundreds of equally innocent and doomed people. And your mouth is not gagged. And you could and absolutely should have SHOUTED! Shouted that you were arrested! that disguised villains are catching people! that they are seizing people based on false denunciations! that a silent massacre of millions is taking place! And hearing such shouts many times a day and in all parts of the city, maybe our fellow citizens would have bristled? maybe arrests would not have become so easy!?
In 1927, when obedience had not yet softened our brains so much, two Chekists tried to arrest a woman in broad daylight on Serpukhovskaya Square. She grabbed a lamppost, started screaming, and resisted. A crowd gathered. (Such a woman was needed, but such a crowd was also needed! Not everyone lowered their eyes, not everyone hurried past!) These nimble fellows immediately became flustered. They cannot work in the light of the public. They got into a car and fled. (And at that point, the woman should have gone straight to the station and left! But she went home to sleep. And they took her to the Lubyanka at night.)
But not a single sound breaks from your parched lips, and the passing crowd carelessly takes you and your executioners for friends out for a stroll.
I myself had the opportunity to shout many times.
On the eleventh day after my arrest, three SMERSH parasites, burdened with four suitcases of trophies more than with me (they already relied on me for the long journey), brought me to the Belorussky railway station in Moscow. They were called special convoy, but in reality, their submachine guns only hindered them from carrying the four heaviest suitcases—loot, plundered in Germany by themselves and their superiors from the SMERSH counterintelligence of the 2nd Belorussian Front, and now being transported to their families in the Fatherland under the pretext of convoying me. The fifth suitcase I reluctantly carried; it contained my diaries and writings—the evidence against me.
All three of them did not know the city, and I had to choose the shortest route to the prison; I myself had to lead them to the Lubyanka, where they had never been (and I confused it with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
After twenty-four hours in army counterintelligence; after three days in front counterintelligence, where my cellmates had already educated me (in the investigator’s deceits, threats, beatings; in the fact that once arrested, one is never released; in the inevitability of a tenner)—I miraculously broke free and now for four days I am traveling as a free man, and among free men, although my sides had already rested on the rotten straw near the slop bucket, though my eyes had already seen the beaten and sleepless, my ears had heard the truth, my mouth had tasted the slop—why am I silent? why do I not enlighten the deceived crowd in my last vocal minute?
I was silent in the Polish town of Brodnica—but maybe they don’t understand Russian there? I did not cry a word on the streets of Bialystok—but maybe this does not concern the Poles? I did not utter a sound at Volkovysk station—but it was sparsely populated. I walked with these bandits on the Minsk platform as if nothing were wrong—but the station is still ruined. And now I lead the SMERSH men after me into the white-domed, round, upper vestibule of the Belorussky-Radial Metro; it is filled with electric light, and from below, an endless stream of Muscovites is coming up towards us on two parallel escalators. They all seem to be looking at me! They are an endless ribbon pulling up from that depth of ignorance—pulling, pulling up to the shining dome, to me, for a word of truth—so why am I silent??!..
But everyone always has a dozen smooth reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.
Some still hope for a favorable outcome and fear to disrupt it with their shouting (we receive no news from the other world; we do not yet know that from the very moment of being taken, our fate is already decided, almost according to the worst scenario, and it cannot be worsened). Others have not yet matured to the concepts that make up a shout to the crowd. After all, it is only for a revolutionary that his slogans are on his lips and rush out, but where are they for a meek, uninvolved ordinary man? He simply DOES NOT KNOW WHAT to shout. And finally, there is another category of people whose chest is too full, whose eyes have seen too much to be able to spill that lake in a few incoherent cries.
And I—I am silent for one more reason: because these Muscovites filling the steps of the two escalators are still not enough for me—not enough! Here my cry would be heard by two hundred, twice two hundred people—but what about two hundred million?.. It vaguely occurs to me that someday I will shout to two hundred million…
And for now, with my mouth unopened, the escalator irresistibly drags me down into the underworld.
And I will also be silent at Okhotny Ryad. I will not cry out near the Metropol Hotel. I will not wave my hands in the Golgotha of Lubyanka Square…
Mine was probably the easiest kind of arrest imaginable. It did not tear me from the embraces of loved ones, did not separate me from our precious home life. In dreary European February, it snatched me from our narrow salient towards the Baltic Sea, where we had either surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us—and deprived me only of my usual division and the picture of the last three months of the war.
The Brigade Commander called me to the Command Post, asked for my pistol for some reason, and I gave it, suspecting no trickery—and suddenly, two counterintelligence agents rushed out from the tense, motionless group of officers in the corner, crossed the room in a few leaps, and grasping simultaneously with four hands at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my belt, my field bag, dramatically shouted: —You are arrested!!
And scorched and pierced from head to toe, I could think of nothing smarter than: —Me? What for?!..
Although there is no answer to this question, surprisingly—I received one! This is worth mentioning because it is so unlike our custom. As soon as the SMERSH men finished stripping me, took away my written political reflections along with the bag, and, oppressed by the shaking of the windows from German shell bursts, hurried me towards the exit—a firm address to me suddenly rang out—yes! across that muffled break between those remaining and me, a break from the heavily fallen word “arrested,” across that plague-ridden line, across which no sound dared to seep, the unthinkable, fabulous words of the Brigade Commander passed!
—Solzhenitsyn. Come back.
And I wrenched myself out of the SMERSH men’s grasp with a sharp turn and stepped back toward the Brigade Commander. I barely knew him; he never condescended to simple conversations with me. His face always expressed command, order, anger to me. But now it was thoughtfully lit up—with shame for his involuntary participation in a dirty deed? with a impulse to rise above a lifetime of pathetic subordination? Ten days ago, I had led my reconnaissance battery out of the pocket where his firing division, twelve heavy guns, remained, almost completely intact—and now he had to renounce me before a scrap of paper with a seal?
—Do you have…—he asked weightily, —a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?
—You cannot!.. You have no right!—the counterintelligence captain and major shouted at the colonel. The staff officers huddled together fearfully in the corner, as if afraid to share the Brigade Commander’s unprecedented rashness (and the political department workers—were preparing to file material on the Brigade Commander). But I had had enough: I immediately understood that I was arrested for corresponding with my school friend, and I knew what lines to expect danger from.
And Zachar Georgievich Travkin could have stopped there! But no! Continuing to cleanse and straighten himself before himself, he rose from the table (he never stood up to meet me in that former life!), reached out his hand across the plague line (he never offered it to me when I was free!), and, with a warming of his always stern face, said fearlessly, distinctly: —I wish you—happiness—Captain!
Not only was I no longer a Captain, but I was an exposed enemy of the people (for here every arrested person is already fully exposed from the moment of arrest). So he wished happiness—to an enemy?..
The windows shook. German shell bursts tore at the earth about two hundred meters away, reminding that this could not have happened deeper in our country, under the dome of established existence, but only under the breath of close and equal death for all.
This book will not be memoirs about my own life. Therefore, I will not recount the funniest details of my completely unique arrest. That night, the SMERSH men completely despaired of figuring out the map (they never did figure it out), and politely handed it to me and asked me to tell the driver how to proceed to army counterintelligence. I myself brought them and myself to that prison, and in gratitude was immediately put not just in a cell, but in a punishment cell. But I cannot omit this little closet in a German peasant house, which served as a temporary punishment cell.
It was the length of a human being, and the width—three could lie closely, but four—shoulder-to-shoulder. I was the fourth, shoved in after midnight, the three lying there winced at me in their sleep in the light of the kerosene lamp and moved over. So on the trampled straw of the floor, there were eight boots towards the door and four greatcoats. They slept, I burned. The more self-confident I was as a Captain half a day ago, the more painfully I was squeezed into the bottom of this little closet. Once or twice the men woke up from their aching sides, and we all turned over at once.
By morning, they had slept enough, yawned, grunted, pulled up their legs, spread out into the different corners, and the acquaintance began.
—And what are you in for?
But a faint wind of wariness had already wafted over me under the poisoned roof of SMERSH, and I sincerely wondered: —I have no idea. Do the bastards even tell you?
However, my cellmates—tankers in soft black helmets—did not conceal it. They were three honest, three simple soldierly hearts—the kind of men I had become attached to during the war years, being myself more complex and worse. All three were officers. Their shoulder boards had also been torn off with malice; here and there, the thread meat stuck out. On the grubby tunics, light spots were the traces of unscrewed medals, dark and red scars on their faces and arms—the memory of wounds and burns. Their division unfortunately came for repairs here, in the same village where the SMERSH counterintelligence of the 48th Army was located. Having relaxed after the battle, which was the day before yesterday, they drank yesterday and broke into the bathhouse in the backyards of the village, where they had noticed two feisty girls went to wash. The girls managed to scamper away, half-dressed, from their badly-behaving drunken feet. But it turned out that one of them belonged to no one else but—the head of the Army counterintelligence.
Yes! The war had been going on in Germany for three weeks already, and we all knew well: if the girls were German—they could be raped, then shot, and it would be almost a combat distinction; if they were Polish or our Russian girls who had been taken away—they could in any case be chased naked through the garden and slapped on the thighs—a funny joke, nothing more. But since this one was the “field wife” of the counterintelligence chief—a rear-echelon sergeant immediately maliciously ripped the shoulder boards off the three combat officers, which had been approved by a front order, took off the medals, issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet—and now these warriors, who had been through the entire war and had crushed perhaps more than one line of enemy trenches, were awaiting a military tribunal, which wouldn’t have even reached this village without their tank.
We extinguished the lamp, which had already burned up all the air we had to breathe here. A volchok [spyhole] the size of a postage stamp had been cut in the door…
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