Monumental Propaganda (27 page)

65

She was lucky enough to buy a ticket for a place in a sleeping compartment. At that time of year the train was almost empty, and she traveled from Sochi to Voronezh alone. Hers was the lower bunk, but she climbed onto the top one, hoping that no one would disturb her there. Although she lay there thinking all day long, she couldn't understand the current leadership. She even understood Baldie better. He'd wanted to make his career by denouncing the leader. He might even have been taking revenge on Stalin for old humiliations. He tried to win a cheap popularity with the people, attempted to please the West, but where were these people taking the cause? Why had they overthrown Khrushchev, promulgated ideological decrees, consolidated the regional Party committees, closed down the journals, repressed the dissidents . . .

At Voronezh an elderly man wearing the uniform of a railroad worker got into the compartment and traveled two stops down the line. He was replaced by two majors of the tank forces and a woman, the wife of one of them, who called her Doughnut. The officers immediately took out a bottle of vodka, and she took out a greasy roast chicken wrapped in newspaper. Doughnut's husband went down to see the conductor and brought back four tea glasses, and the other major looked up at Aglaya.

“I beg your pardon, lady, would you care to join us?”

“No thank you,” said Aglaya, but then regretted it when she heard the glasses chinking and the chicken crunching as they broke it. From the soldiers' conversation she gathered that they were serving in Czechoslovakia and, sticking her head down from the bunk, she inquired what the counterrevolution was getting up to there.

“How do you mean?” asked Doughnut's husband.

“What I mean is, is there strong anti-Soviet feeling among the Czechs?”

“Yes, there is,” said the major.

“About the same as here,” his comrade added.

“Tell me,” she said, getting agitated, “what's the general feeling about Comrade Stalin in army circles?”

Everybody below was silent for a moment, and then Doughnut's husband said: “You know, lady, we have a rule—when we're drinking, we don't talk about politics.”

“And even less when we're sober,” the other major put in.

“But in general,” said Doughnut's husband, “we Soviet officers support the domestic and foreign policy of the Party absolutely and completely.”

The officers were clearly afraid to say what they thought, and Aglaya reflected sorrowfully on the condition to which the people had been reduced by the present-day leadership. Even serving officers were afraid to express their opinion. And she thought that serving officers had never been afraid to express their opinion before.

At night she dreamed that some people were dragging Stalin out of her flat to his grave and that Porosyaninov and Mikoyan were directing the removal. The vision was so terrible and so distressing that she groaned and cried out, just like the previous night in the hotel.

“What's wrong?” Doughnut asked her anxiously. “Are you in some kind of pain?”

“No, no,” she mumbled, and immediately cried out again when she dreamed of Him lying on the municipal dump, alive.

When she reached Dolgov, she waved down a dump truck at the station and rode home for a ruble. She ran up the stairs, almost knocking Shubkin off his feet as he made his way downstairs, whistling his beloved “Brigantine.”

Her hand was shaking; the key wouldn't go into the keyhole. Eventually, she managed to turn the lock, pushed open the door, dropped her suitcase on the threshold and dashed into the sitting room . . .

He was standing in his place, with his shoulders slumped sadly and covered in dust, finally admitting his defeat.

“Comrade Stalin!” said Aglaya, falling on her knees before him.

She embraced his iron legs in her arms and pressed her wet cheek against them. Then she either fell asleep or her mind simply tuned into a different reality, but she saw a clear vision of that sunny day, October 29, 1941. It must have been the final fling of a long, lingering Indian summer. A day like that ought to have been quiet and peaceful, but it wasn't. Advance German units had moved right up to Dolgov, and the frequent rifle shots, bursts of machine-gun fire and occasional detonations of artillery shells could be heard only too clearly. Some of them had hit their mark. The railroad station and the grain elevator were burning, and the lacquer and paint factory was blazing furiously. The smoke from this flame, a mixture of unusual, poisonous colors—blue, green, yellow and crimson—first rose a little into the air, then twisted and stretched out into a long, vicious stripe above the eastern outskirts of the town. But the people Aglaya had seen as she walked along were behaving as though they hadn't seen or heard a thing. At the water standpipe there was a short queue of people with buckets and yokes for carrying them. In one of the yards a pregnant woman in a red blouse was hanging her washing out on the line and two teenagers were playing soccer in front of the gates, booting a tin can about for lack of a ball. Aglaya found the sight of all this strange, but she had no time for feeling surprised. She walked unhurriedly along Poperechno-Pochtamtskaya Street without really looking around her much, chewing on an extinguished a cigarette as she pushed a handcart with two bicycle wheels ahead of her like a child's perambulator. Laid out neatly on the trolley were about twenty bundles each about the size of a brick, wrapped in newspaper and tied up with string, a tractor engine battery, two field telephone sets, a reel of thin cable and another with cable a bit thicker.

As she was walking past the prison, Aglaya's attention was caught by a short citizen of indeterminate age who hadn't washed or shaved in a long time, wearing a tattered undershirt with nothing underneath it. The man was not alone—he had a piebald shorthorn cow with him, which he was leading on a long rope. The man seemed familiar to Aglaya, and when she looked closer, she recognized him as her own husband, Andrei Eremeevich Revkin, who had been arrested by the NKVD a few days before the war for getting politically immature ideas into his head. As though she weren't surprised to see him there, Aglaya didn't say hello; she asked: “What are you up to, have you escaped from jail?”

“Eh?” he asked, showing no surprise either and not understanding what was going on.

Aglaya repeated her question.

“No,” he said. “The guards ran off and I just walked away.”

“What's the cow for?”

“It was in the same cell as me.”

“A cow?” This time Aglaya was surprised. “What was she in jail for?”

“For nothing,” said Revkin. “Just for being a cow. The prison manager took her off someone and hid her in the jail to milk her.”

“Okay,” said Aglaya. “Dump her and come with me.”

Revkin obeyed immediately. It was all the same to him where he went and what he did.

Now they pushed the handcart along together. Not knowing where it ought to go, the cow plodded along behind them, dragging its rope in the dust. Until a skinny old crone, who had evidently realized the cow didn't belong to anyone, came dashing out of her hut and dragged the cow back home with her. On the way Aglaya explained to Andrei Eremeevich that the regional committee, which had gone underground, had given orders for the Dolgov power station to be blown up immediately. The newspaper bundles were dynamite. The two mine layers sent with the explosive had run off, but before they went, they had explained to Aglaya how to assemble these pieces into an infernal device and how to detonate it.

A few minutes later Aglaya and Andrei trundled the handcart onto the grounds of the power station, which was not operating and was quite unguarded. They carried the battery into the checkpoint office and left one telephone there. Then they pushed the rest of their load to the main power unit, which contained the biggest generator.

“Stop!” said Aglaya. “Take some bundles and let's go. But be careful, it's dynamite.”

It was quiet and cold in the generator hall, with a smell of damp and machine oil. Nothing was working and the hands of all the instruments stood at zero. While Revkin was bringing through the bundles, Aglaya carried in the second telephone and rolled in the drum with thick cable, immediately reeling out several meters. Then she took two bundles of dynamite and crawled in under the body of the main generator on all fours. As she was crawling out of there in the same position, her skirt snagged on a bolt and rode up, exposing her skinny backside in long, wrinkled lettuce-green pants. This sight proved too strong a temptation for Revkin to resist, and he gave her a hard kick, losing his shoe in the process.

Aglaya fell flat on her belly and immediately crawled out and fixed her husband with a stare of incomprehension. He picked up his shoe and stood there in front of her, smiling.

“What's wrong with you,” she asked quietly. “Did you eat a daisy, or are you just plain crazy?”

He didn't reply, just smiled beatifically.

“Idiot,” she said, scratching her buttock. “What kind of stupid joke is that? I'm carrying dynamite.”

He seemed completely out of it, and she asked him if he understood where he was and if he could do what she was going to ask him to do. He nodded as though he understood, and she explained where to set the remaining charges, how to connect them with the thin wire and how to wind the thin wire onto the ends of the cable.

“I'll be waiting in the checkpoint office,” she said. “When it's all finished, call me on this phone and then leave immediately. Exactly two minutes later”—she took a man's pocket watch out of her leather jacket— “I'll touch the ends together. We'll meet at Miliagi's grave on the Square of the Fallen Warriors. Do you understand?”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” Revkin said with a nod.

“All right then.” She put the watch in her pocket, gave her husband another curious glance and began rolling the drum in the direction of the checkpoint, unreeling cable as she went.

The office of the power station's head of security was a spacious room with windows on three sides, and the wall spaces between the windows were decorated with posters, diagrams and two portraits: Stalin lighting up his pipe and Lenin bending over the national electrification plan, GOELRO. The head of security's desk was empty except for a marble inkwell with dried-up ink and a small electric hot plate with a big kettle with some of its enamel chipped away. Aglaya set the battery down beside the hot plate and attached one end of the cable to the positive terminal, bending the other end as far as possible away from the negative terminal. The kettle contained water that wasn't showing any signs of turning stagnant yet. Aglaya remembered she had two stale honey cakes in her pocket (she'd picked them up on her way out of the house) and thought now would be just the right moment to have a drink, at least of hot water. She switched on the hot plate and began waiting for the spiral to heat up. But the spiral didn't heat up, and Aglaya, remembering that there was nothing to make it heat up, set about lighting the iron stove. Somewhere in the distance she heard the faint sounds of machine-gun and small-arms fire, but they mingled with the crackling of the firewood in the stove and didn't give her the slightest sense of any danger.

In the checkpoint office Aglaya found not only an iron drinking dipper, but even a packet of tea in the drawer of the desk and a piece of halva in gray, oil-stained paper. After she had arranged a tea party fit for a king, she looked out of the window at the dusty street, where there was a goat lying under a fence to which it was tethered and chickens were wandering about not concerned in the least about the distant gunfire. The idiotic thought came to her that those chickens probably couldn't care less who held power here—Soviets, Russians or Germans. Men would come from a different country, wearing a different uniform, introduce different ways of doing things, raise different flags, put up different portraits, erect gallows for the communists, and the chickens would carry on rummaging in the dirt, laying eggs and clucking idiotically. She was suddenly overcome by such a strong feeling of hate for those brainless chickens that if she'd had a machine gun she would have finished them all off there and then. But this feeling passed as abruptly as it had appeared: whatever faults Aglaya may have had, even she realized it was stupid and ridiculous to hate such innocent creatures.

Aglaya took the watch out of her pocket. Forty minutes had passed since she left her husband at the main generator, and he still hadn't given any signal.

The sounds of gunfire were less frequent now, but closer.

In former times Aglaya would never have doubted her husband for a second, but now she was rather worried: what was he doing over there, with his damaged mind, and was he doing anything at all? Aglaya twirled the handle of the telephone set. There was no answer. She began trying to make a roll-up and noticed that her hands were shaking badly, the makhorka was spilling and she couldn't put together a cigarette.

At the end of the street a cloud of dust rose into the air, gave out a chirring sound and began advancing rapidly toward the power station. The chickens scattered and ran, but the goat tethered to the fence didn't even stir, as though realizing its position was hopeless. As it drew close to the station, the cloud resolved itself into a column of heavy motorcycles driving two abreast, each carrying three motorcycle troops in dusty leather jackets and goggles, their faces blackened by dust, looking like some demonic force that nothing could ever stop.

As soon as they drove in through the wide-open gates, the motorcycle at the front on the right drove off to one side and stopped, and the two passengers who leapt out of it pointed their short submachine guns at the checkpoint, while the third soldier, a tall man, began waving with his arm to hurry on the rest as they rode into the station grounds.

And just then the telephone standing on the desk in front of Aglaya gave a tranquil, feeble tinkle, and Aglaya heard her husband's voice.