Prohibition of Interference. Book 1. Макс Глебов

read and remembered the names of the people who once lived here, their dates of birth, and in some cases – of death. The overall picture was poor. Apparently, here, in the middle of nowhere, even births and deaths were not well documented, to say nothing of other, less significant facts of citizens' biographies. But I did manage to understand some things. The documents in a separate box apparently belonged to the last inhabitant of the house – Ivan Terentyevich Nagulin, born in 1890.

      Judging by the names I could make out on several covers of books blackened by time and damp, he was, like the rest of his family, Old Believer, who had gone into the woods with his parents at the end of the 19th century, and who had been staying in the taiga permanently ever since. Ivan Terentyevich was old enough to be my father, and after some reflection, I decided that I could not find a better option for my legend.

* * *

      I was too late for the start of the war after all. An Old Believer who came out of the taiga, having decided to return to the world after his father's death, aroused natural distrust in the representatives of the Republic's authorities. The lack of other documents than my 'father's' passport, issued back in czarist Russia, also did not help my smooth entry into the local society. I was lucky enough to get some of the right words from the newspaper Tuvan Truth, published here in Russian, which was crudely pasted on the wall of the house of some official institution in Kyzyl. I surrendered to the local people's militia completely voluntarily, so I was beaten without any excess, just to prevent and to make sure I knew exactly where I ended up.

      The district militia chief, to whose office I was taken after my arrest and initial processing, was rather skeptical about my words about the boring taiga and my desire to return to my ancestral homeland. It seemed that my case was not unique here, although it was quite rare. After the interrogation, which he conducted with a boredom in his eyes, he scribbled some words on a yellowish sheet of paper and summoned a sleepy guard, who took me to a cell with a dirt floor and uneven, badly painted walls. No one was going to feed me here, but they did give me some water.

      Toward evening a representative of the local security service came to pick me up. This organization bore the complicated name of the Office of State Internal Political Security. Unlike the militiamen, the officer who arrived was Russian, and his uniform was of much higher quality. Guarded by a soldier armed with a rifle that was outdated even by local standards, I was taken to the central part of town in a very quaint and mercilessly stinking horse-drawn vehicle.

      They didn't keep me in a cell and immediately sent me for interrogation. The specialists here were more thorough, in the sense that they beat me longer and more thoughtfully. Nevertheless, they weren't going to maim me, because they didn't seem to have anything to maim me for yet. Naturally, I offered no resistance, limiting myself to timely tensing and relaxing the necessary muscle groups, as well as making light movements of the body and limbs, which helped to minimize the damage to my body from the not too dexterous and skillful blows of the investigators.

      At the first interrogation I heard no intelligible questions, except the idiotic accusations of espionage and work for subversive counterrevolutionary organizations. Naturally, I kept making round, innocent eyes, pretending complete incomprehension, and I kept bluntly telling time after time about my Old Believer father who died in the taiga, and the rest of the family, whom I barely remember, who were carried away by some contagious disease. However, the investigator didn't really insist on anything. Apparently, this was the custom here, and it was all standard psychological treatment before the normal interrogation, which took place only a week later.

      I don't know how long this whole story would have lasted, and maybe I would have been sent to some mines or camps in the end, for free labor was not at all superfluous to the expanding economy of the People's Republic, but then the Führer of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, ran out of patience and ordered an attack on the USSR. Information about the outbreak of war roused the Tuvan People's Republic with unexpected force. Even I, a prisoner without rights, was made aware of this information, although they could have done without telling me about it, for I knew what was going on far better than any of the investigators here, and even better than Comrade Stalin himself, because from low orbit it was perfectly visible how endless columns of tanks and infantry were advancing toward the border, how technicians at airfields were bustling about, hanging bombs on planes, and how the whole armada, obeying the iron will of their Führer, came into motion and crossed the Soviet border to the roar of the artillery cannonade.

      The Tuvan Communist government owed much to Comrade Stalin, so much so that on the same day, June 22, it declared war on Germany, and proclaimed through the Great Khural that 'The Tuvan people, led by the entire revolutionary party and government, not sparing their lives, are ready to participate with all their might and means in the struggle of the Soviet Union against the fascist aggressor until final victory over him'. How about that! And that's when I declared that I wanted to do it, too – without sparing my life and with all my might!

      I don't know what I did to convince the local security service, but they didn't seem to see me as a subversive person or a real spy after all. And what can you take from a Russian who is eager to fight for Comrade Stalin in a friendly Soviet Union? Why waste energy and time on him when you can let this naive young guy go to the USSR and thereby serve the mighty neighbor by throwing him some cannon fodder. People like me – not in the sense of those who came out of the taiga without documents, but in the sense of the Russians who wanted to fight the fascist aggressors along with their Soviet brothers, there were an unexpectedly large number of them in Tuva.

      In the end I was given a document that struck me as blatantly unclear and completely devoid of any means of protection against forgery. This paper stated that I was Pyotr Ivanovich Nagulin, born in 1921, Russian. And, in fact, that was it. No citizenship, no place of residence, no education, no occupation, not even a number – nothing. In general, it was possible to understand the local officials who gave me this document. I claimed that I didn't even know exactly on whose territory my father's cabin was located. I only knew roughly where to go, but I walked for many days and came out of the forest in Tuva. I said that I really wanted to go to the Soviet Union and asked the local officials to help me. Where are my papers? There weren't any, in the taiga, well, either my father lost them or hid them somewhere so that I couldn't find them.

      No one was going to leave me in Tuva, and the fate of a Russian who had asked to go to war to the Soviet Union was of no interest to them at all. They somehow lived without me until I came out of the taiga, and they will evidently be able to live on later, when I go to my ancestral homeland to gain military glory or, much more likely, a tin star on my future obelisk.

* * *

      The train moved slowly, as if bowing to every pole, and getting stuck for a long time at inconspicuous tiny stations. The impact of the big war could be felt here too, but so far only by the tense faces of the locals and the abundance of men in uniform.

      No matter how hard I tried, the bureaucratic machine was too slow to react to external stimuli, even to those as strong as the outbreak of war. The notion that 'the Red Army is the strongest', instilled in the Soviet people by official propaganda as an immutable truth, led Soviet officials, especially those in the rear, to realize the gravity of the situation far from immediately.

      In general, the fighter Pyotr Nagulin, in my person, found himself in an echelon bound for the front only at the end of July. Already the border battles, in which the best-trained cadre of the Soviet army had been killed, were over, heavy fighting near Smolensk had been going on for two weeks, the battles for Kiev and Leningrad had already unfolded, and in the south the Germans and Romanians were coming to the outskirts of Odessa. And I was slowly dragged across the vast country in a goods van with three-story bunks, packed to the limit with guys like me, who were cheerfully and confidently talking about how they would beat the Nazis – political propaganda worked here without fail.

      Every few hours I closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep, and reviewed the images taken from orbit, projected onto the surface of the contact lenses. I didn't like what I saw. We were going to hell. With songs, laughter, and the reckless enthusiasm of youth.

      Chapter 3

      A tall guy with a round face and a perpetual smile on his lips flopped down on the bunk next to me. I've noticed him more than once – the man couldn't sit still. In