Time Will Run Back

Chapter 2

THE wind was blowing upswirls of dust, cigarette butts and X tattered newspapers. Peter bent forward against it, constantly turning his head to protect his eyes and throat from the grit.

If Moscow looked shabby from thirty stories up, it was squalid from the pavement. The buildings were in every stage of disrepair and decay. The only relief to this drabness—if it was relief—was the omnipresent posters, displaying either enormous faces of Stalenin or exhortations to Work! Production! Loyalty! and warnings against Wreckers and Spies.

The people, too, were drab. The typical face was as devoid of expression as the back of a baby’s head. The women wore precisely the same shabby gray proletarian uniforms as the men. Why had he expected anything else? Then he remembered. His mother had always worn something she called skirts. It was the first time it had ever occurred to him that she might have been in any way affected or eccentric.

What he was seeing now was the real world. His previous life on his Bermuda island suddenly struck him as a strangely insulated, even sterilized, existence. He was beginning to feel like a freak.

He found himself in front of what appeared to be a small public library. His interest quickened. Could he go in? He decided to chance it.

It was restful inside. He browsed among the shelves.

“Is there anything special I can get you?”

A pretty, smiling blonde stood at his elbow. She was a Deputy, in a neat blue uniform. She had a soft, sympathetic face, and the deepest blue eyes he had ever seen.

She would understand me, he thought immediately.

“I’m the librarian,” she offered.

There must be something special he wanted. Ah yes. “Where is your music department? I’d like to see the Mozart scores.” “The Mozart scores? Why, they’re in the Old World Department... they’re on the Special Privilege list!”

“What do you mean—Old World Department?”

She looked at him incredulously. Oh well, he was only a Proletarian.

“The Mozart scores,” she said, as if talking to a child, “are among the small list of books held out from the Great Liberating Bonfires when the old poisoned capitalist civilization was destroyed. No book on that list can be read by anybody who does not hold a Special Privilege card. I’m not allowed to read them myself. They are in a special room behind two locked iron doors. My key opens only the first.”

“Where do I get a Special Privilege card?” Peter asked.

She looked pointedly at his proletarian uniform. “Personally I never heard of anybody’s holding a Special Privilege card who wasn’t a member of the Protectorate, and even a Party member.”

“But why shouldn’t anybody be allowed to read any book there is?”

This time she looked at him more sharply. Suspicion came into her eyes. Nobody, even from a collective farm, could be as ignorant as this. Was she dealing with a member of the secret police?

“It would be a pretty state of affairs,” she said mechanically, “if everybody were allowed to read the books kept over from the old poisoned capitalist civilization. Putting all sorts of subversive notions into people’s heads! Only a small trained class can be allowed to read those books—only people whose minds are so disciplined that they will not be upset by every scrap of the old bourgeois ideology that they come across. Even this small class is only allowed to read these books so that they will be prepared to answer the lies that may be brought forward by malicious wreckers.”

“But Mozart,” Peter insisted. “What possible harm can there be in the liquid gold of Mozart?”

Surely a member of the secret police! This was a tricky question. Her livelihood might depend upon the answer.

“What possible harm? It isn’t for me to say. But still, it’s safer to confine every book of whatever kind carried over from the old poisoned civilization to a Special Privilege list. A very wise decision.”

She was watching his eyes closely, apparently to see how he was taking this answer.

“Don’t worry too much,” she went on, now in a kindly tone, “about not having a Special Privilege card. We have many wonderful books.” She led him along the shelves. “Here, for example, are our books giving the life story of our Great Dictator, Stalenin.”

“Why is there no one in the library but myself?” asked Peter.

Her glance once more became suspicious and fearful. “The library does everything possible,” she said, “to induce people to read these books. We always recommend them first. Some of them doubtless do not praise Stalenin in sufficiently high terms to satisfy readers. And then I think there is a moral laxity in the people. We need to get after that.”

That answer is self-contradictory, thought Peter. What is she saying—that the books are not good enough for the readers, or that the readers are not good enough for the books?

He felt beaten. The books looked hopelessly dull. He sensed, moreover, that he was being too inquisitive. And he wanted her to like him.

“Well, these are very wonderful books,” he said, “but it just occurs to me that I am going out with friends tonight, and I may mislay a book if I take it now. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“The library’s closed tomorrow. May Day.”

“Oh yes; of course. Will you be watching the parade?”

“Naturally.”

“So will I. I may see you then.”

She smiled at the improbability. Suddenly she understood. Of course he would see her. He had been assigned to see her. She stared at him in open fright. Her eyes fell on his left lapel, where his number badge should have been. There was none. Triumphantly: “I’ll have to see your identity card, please.”

His identity card! It might give him away. But his father had assured him... He produced the card.

“Peter Uldanov,” she read expressionlessly. She wrote down the name in a card file along with the date and the hour he had been there. “Number?”

So the name didn’t mean anything to her.

“I haven’t got a local number yet. This is my first day in Moscow. I’m sorry about my stupid questions. But I’d like to drop in again—often—and look at your books.”