About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blindingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge….

TCHITCHERINE’S HAUNTING

As to whether the man is or isn’t Nikolai Ripov: he does arrive the way Ripov is said to: heavy and inescapable. He wants to talk, only to talk. But somehow, as they progress, into the indoor corridor-confusions of words, again and again he will trick Tchitcherine into uttering heresy, into damning himself.

“I’m here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should air them, honestly, man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don’t you think I’ve had doubts? Even Stalin’s had them. We all have.”

“It’s all right though. It isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

“But you’re not handling it, or they wouldn’t have sent me out here. Don’t you think they know when someone they care for is in trouble?”

Tchitcherine doesn’t want to ask. He strains against it with the muscles of his heart-cage. The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing down his left arm. But he asks, feeling his breath shift a little, “Was I supposed to die?”

“When, Vaslav?”

“In the War.”

“Oh, Vaslav.”

“You wanted to hear what was troubling me.”

“But don’t you see how they’ll take that? Come, bring it all the way out. We lost twenty million souls, Vaslav. It’s not an accusation you can make lightly. They’d want documentation. Even your life might be in danger—”

“I’m not accusing anyone… please don’t… I only want to know if I am supposed to die for them.”

“No one wants you to die.” Soothing. “Why do you think that?”

So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate, too many words—paranoid suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning himself, growing the capsule around his person that will isolate him from the community forever….

“Yet that’s the very heart of History,” the gentle voice talking across twilight, neither man having risen to light a lamp. “The inmost heart. How could everything you know, all you’ve seen and touched of it, be fed by a lie?”

“But life after death…”

“There is no life after death.”

Tchitcherine means he’s had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring, Tchitcherine’s first glimpse after the years of training: taller, more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he’d ever expected—only in the ring, feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did he turn to a Theory of History—of all pathetic cold comforts—to try and make sense of it.