VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV
169
of losing their good names, and prefer writing us reports under a
pseudonym. But we aren't offended by that."
When I got home I took a shower, scrubbing myself all over. It
was something I did whenever I had had a talk with a
gebist.
Later I
began to suffer from syphilophobia and monstrous pangs of
conscience at the thought that I might have infected my wife, Lena
Klepikova . Seeing doctors was of no help. At every opportunity, I
would take out my penis to see how far the disease had progressed.
I shall not describe the other aftereffects of the meetings with
KGB people to which I was summoned, but I experienced a good
variety of them. They were the wages of fear. I paid in humiliation,
shattered nerves, insomnia, illness both real and imaginary, and
madness . And now I am paying for that fear with emigration-a
course I decided on when I realized that those meetings were not
only humiliating me but gradually destroying me .
(And what if I had not been aJew with recourse to emigration
as, literally, a way out? Or what if I had lived at another time, when
that way out was not available to Jews?)
Hot showers and soap could not wash off the shame of those
meetings. I decided, then, to make use of them professionally, as a
journalist and scholar, and I began to make notes on what had been
said at them. This was my revenge for humiliation and a liberation
from my fears - somewhat in the manner of Goya's
Capriccios.
Yet in
another way it only added to those fears: now I began to fear for my
swelling manuscript. I was afraid they would come and take it away
from me and put me in prison.
This article is composed of two disparate things: on the one
hand, my fragmentary diary notes, steeped in hatred; on the other,
my present attitude - one of scholarly detachment and almost of
indifference - toward the organization that caused me so much
nervous anxiety when I was living in the USSR.
It
is rather like two
different descriptions of a zoo, one of which has been written by a
casual visitor or a scientific observer, and the other by a beast in a
cage. The nature of the beast-whether it be a lion, a wolf, a hyena,
a jackal, or a snake-does not matter.
It
does not, because any
visitor to the KGB, regardless of what he has been before that visit,
is transformed into one of its agents.
The technique used in effecting those transformations is quite
simple - no more complex than Iago's plot against Othello . But, just
