The Cost of a Clean File
Kolvograd — Day Twenty-Nine
Colonel Levan Dzhugash had been in the Lubny house for eighteen days when General Yusef Baranin finally went to see him, and he went not out of conscience, which he had trained himself long ago to treat as a luxury item, but because Sechenov had asked him to, in the particular soft voice that made a request indistinguishable from an order.
“He is asking for you specifically,” Sechenov had said, over tea, touching his fingertips together in the gesture Baranin had come to read the way other men read weather.
“It would be a kindness to see him. And it would tell me a great deal about the file, General, to watch how the two of you speak to one another.”
Baranin had understood the second sentence perfectly.
He had not answered it.
He had simply said he would go.
The Lubny house did not look like what it was.
It had been, before the war, a sanatorium for railway officials with weak lungs, a long yellow building with tall windows and a colonnade, and the men who ran it now had changed almost nothing about its face, which Baranin had come to believe was deliberate — that a building which still looked like mercy was a more effective instrument than one which announced itself as its opposite.
Dzhugash was brought to a small visiting room with a table and two chairs and a window painted over on the inside.
He had lost perhaps eight kilograms.
His uniform, unbelted, hung from him the way a uniform hangs from a coat stand, and his hands, folded on the table, trembled with a fine constant motion that Baranin recognized, because he had seen it before in men who had stopped sleeping in any sense that word usually meant.
“General.” Dzhugash’s voice was hoarse, careful.
“Thank you for coming.”
“How are you being treated?”
“Correctly.” A small, terrible smile. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“They are always very correct here. That is, I think, the worst part of it. I would find it easier if someone shouted.”
Baranin sat down across from him and said nothing for a moment, and in the silence Dzhugash’s eyes moved, briefly, to the corner of the ceiling, where Baranin understood there would be a microphone, and back again, and something passed between the two men that neither of them needed to put into words: that whatever was said in this room would be heard by a third party, and that both of them were, in their different ways, performing for it.
“I have read your assessment from the spring,” Baranin said, in the flat, official register he had rehearsed on the drive over.
“The recommendation for a guard regiment at Dulbin and Ryazh-Uzel. It was thorough. It was correct. I regret that it was not acted upon.”
“By the Rail Directorate,” said Dzhugash, and his eyes held Baranin’s for a fraction of a second longer than was comfortable.
“I understand that is the finding.”
“That is the finding.”
“I submitted the assessment to your desk, General. Not to the Directorate’s.”
The room was very quiet.
Somewhere beyond the painted window, a cart wheel needed oiling.
“You submitted it,” Baranin said, in the same flat register, “and it was correctly forwarded through the appropriate channel for action, which was the Rail Directorate’s responsibility to execute. The file reflects that.”
“Does it.”
“The file reflects that, Colonel.”
Dzhugash looked at him for a long moment, and something in his ruined face settled, not into acceptance exactly, but into a kind of exhausted understanding, the understanding of a man who has finally seen the whole shape of the thing that is killing him and has stopped wasting what strength remains on being surprised by it.
“I see,” he said quietly.
“Then I imagine the file also reflects that I have nothing further to add. Since the file is, as you say, correct.”
“It reflects that,” said Baranin, “and I have asked that your conditions be reviewed favorably, given your record.”
“Thank you, General.” Dzhugash’s hands, on the table, had stopped trembling, which was somehow worse than the trembling had been. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“That is very generous.”
He left the Lubny house a little after four and sat in the back of the staff car for the whole of the drive back to Stepnaya Street without speaking, and the driver, who had learned in eleven weeks not to ask, said nothing either.
He had gone to the house believing he would find something in himself when he sat across from the man whose ruin he had authored — some resistance, some cost exacted from his own conscience, proof that the thing had at least not been free.
He had found instead a kind of terrible fluency: the official sentences had come out of him in the correct order, unhesitating, and he had watched Dzhugash understand them and accept them and even, in his broken way, thank him for them, and the whole transaction had taken perhaps six minutes, and he had felt, throughout it, almost nothing at all.
That was the thing he could not get out of his mind on the drive back.
Not the guilt — he had expected guilt, had in some sense prepared for it, had a shelf ready in himself to put it on.
It was the absence of resistance.
Six months ago, he thought, watching the grey suburbs of Kolvograd slide past the window, a lie like that would have cost him a sleepless night at minimum.
Now it had cost him nothing he could locate, and he understood, with the particular cold clarity that comes late in a long day, that this was not a sign he had grown stronger.
It was a sign of what the file, and Sechenov, and eleven days at the war-aims desk, had already quietly taken from him, one correctly-worded sentence at a time, and that the next file — and there would be a next file, he had no illusions about that — would cost him even less.
Sechenov was waiting in the corridor outside the war-aims room when he returned, hands folded, fingertips touching, an expression on his gentle face that might, in a kinder man, have been called satisfaction.
“How was the Colonel?”
“Correct,” said Baranin.
“He was very correct.”
“Good,” said Sechenov, and smiled, and the two men walked back into the war-aims room together, and the map on the wall, with its clusters of red pins around a city that no longer mattered and its thin scatter of them along a river where the war actually was, waited for both of them, unchanged.