Monumental Propaganda (39 page)

98

On Tverskaya Square opposite the former Moscow City Soviet Building, a unit of mounted police was waiting, and the equestrian statue of the city's founder, Yury Dolgoruky, towered up in the midst of these horse-men like their commander.

Suddenly, someone said: “Look, look!”

Aglaya glanced ahead, and where Tverskaya Street ran into Hunter's Row, she saw a cordon of men in green helmets with Plexiglas shields and truncheons. They stood there in a menacing, unassailable wall, their faces tensed as if they were facing the advance of 180 crack enemy divisions, not just a bunch of old people. Some of the demonstrators felt a bit frightened and slowed their stride despite themselves. But Aglaya broke off the song they were singing and took up the Soviet national anthem:

Unshakable union of free republics
Forever united by Russia the great . . .

 

Her voice was decrepit, hoarse and low, but Fyodor Fyodorovich joined in and supported her in his creaky tones:

Created as one by the will of the peoples,
Soviet Union, united and strong . . .

 

They were supported in turn by the owner of the diesel-electric ships, and everybody picked up the refrain:

Glory, our Fatherland . . .

They approached the OMON Special Police to the strains of the anthem, halted face-to-face with them and marked time as they continued singing.

The sun of our freedom shone through the dark storm,

sang Aglaya, remembering the beginning of the second verse.

And our mighty Lenin illumined our way,

continued General Burdalakov, smacking his right foot against the cobblestones.

Raised up by Stalin,

Aglaya joined in joyfully . . .

“Comrades,” called a marshal, running along the column, “please, all of you, maintain formation. Do not break formation.”

But despite this the column gradually folded into itself, its ranks spreading out along the cordon, and Aglaya found herself standing face-to-face with a policeman, a young country boy of about twenty, with little slanting eyes set in a round face. The demonstrators carried on singing their song and Aglaya sang with them, looking the policeman straight in the eye. He gazed at her in unblinking amazement. Aglaya looked around at the other policemen; they were standing firm too, but they were exchanging glances and laughing. Aglaya's feelings were absolutely divided. On the one hand, these seemed like our very own Soviet, Russian lads, the same kind she'd gone into the attack with against a detested enemy, but on the other hand they were the detested enemy, prepared to join battle with her when the order came.

Meanwhile, a police sergeant, also wearing a helmet but without a shield, approached Glukhov and tried to tell him something, but Glukhov wouldn't let him speak, he carried on singing and only gave him his attention when the song was finished.

“What is it, Colonel? What's the
problème
?”

“Mr. Glukhov,” the sergeant said in a quiet voice, “I have been instructed to inform you that your demonstration terminates at this point. Please inform your people and have them disperse.”

“Why should we?” asked Glukhov. “We had a firm agreement with the mayor.”

“I don't know what agreement you had with anyone, but I have been ordered—”

“Ordered by whom? Who gave the order?”

“It doesn't matter who, but the order has been given to clear the road and restore the movement of traffic. And I shall carry out that order.”

“You can carry it out, but first we'll go through to the Mausoleum and lay our wreaths . . .”

“One at a time, by all means, but not in a column.”

“No,” said Glukhov firmly, “we're going through in a column.”

“Mr. Glukhov,” the sergeant said wearily, “I have no wish to squabble with you, but your demonstration is terminated. If you do not do as you are told, force will be used against you.”

“What? Force?” cried Fyodor Fyodorovich, suddenly leaping forward with his standard. “Do you know whom you're talking to? And what way is that to stand in front of me? You're standing in front of a general. Attention!”

“Comrade General, please restrain yourself. I am carrying out the order of the government of Moscow here, and for me you are not a general, but an individual disrupting social order.”

“I'm disrupting social order!” Fyodor Fyodorovich was outraged. “Why you sniveling brat! You scum! I took Berlin! I spilled my blood for you! I'll strip you of your epaulettes!”

He even reached out for the sergeant's epaulettes, but Glukhov grabbed his arm.

“Fyodor Fyodorovich! Control yourself! We are an organized force and we do not allow ourselves to be provoked.”

The general was still twitching, but he let himself be restrained.

The rows of demonstrators were nervous. They huddled together into a tight bunch, and some of the participants began making their way to the edge to get out of harm's way; but others did the opposite and pressed forward.

Glukhov attempted to calm the crowd down, waving his hands above his head and shouting out: “Comrades! Keep calm and maintain order! Take your places in the column!”

Suddenly, Syropov was there beside him again. He began pushing Glukhov in the chest, spitting at him and yelling: “Comrades! Friends! Brothers-in-arms! Don't listen to renegades! We're all Russians, aren't we? We're the heirs of Lenin, Stalin, Minin and Pozharsky! Forward to the Kremlin! Forward to the Kremlin!”

Out of nowhere a group of young men with wild, staring eyes had appeared beside him. They began howling in chorus: “Stalin! Beria! Gulag!”

The other group carried on chanting: “To the Kremlin! To the Kremlin!”

Someone pushed Aglaya in the back, forcing her right up against the special policeman with the wooden face, but he still didn't react and carried on staring at Aglaya without blinking.

But she suddenly felt like a bold young fighter again, and forgetting when all this was taking place, she shouted: “For the motherland, for Stalin—forward!”

“Take Berlin!” Burdalakov squealed beside her, and turning the staff of his standard around like a pike, he lunged with it, seriously intending to thrust it through the colonel standing in front of him. The colonel dodged, and the general, misjudging his balance, fell to the ground and began twitching.

“They've killed him! They've killed him!” someone shouted.

“They've killed the general!” shouted someone farther off.

“Comrades, maintain order!” called Alfred Glukhov's voice, faint and lost, but no one listened to him. The demonstrators, transformed into an unmanageable crowd, fell on the special policemen, pushing them in the chest, but the police deftly protected themselves with their shields. Aglaya transferred the portrait of Stalin to her left hand and began shoving her policeman with her right hand. He repelled her lazily with his shield. Aglaya became even more furious, and, leaning around the shield, she struck his helmet with the portrait. Nothing happened to the helmet, but the portrait came to pieces. The frame fell apart and the paper tore. That drove Aglaya into an even greater frenzy, and, putting her head down like a young bull, she dashed at the policeman intending to butt him, but he put his shield in the way again and she smashed her unprotected head into it as if it were a concrete wall.

If she had been forty or less, perhaps it wouldn't have mattered much, but for an old woman of eighty the blow was too strong. She felt no pain, but suddenly she wanted to sit down, and she slumped onto the wet asphalt. The jostling, squealing and shouting continued all around her, and someone was groaning and swearing obscenely. Unfamiliar faces— young, handsome and wet—bent down over her, she laughed, they asked what she was laughing at and someone answered for her that she was delirious.

Then she finally lost consciousness and came to in a room on a canvas camp bed. A woman in a white coat and glasses was sitting at a table and writing something. Another woman in a white coat was standing beside her and speaking on the phone in some language Aglaya didn't know:

“Pizza Hut. Groovy menu. Lobsters, roast beef, fricassee. Prawns, pudding. Chianti—sixty bucks . . . Okay! Dump it on the pager. Or fax it over. No e-mail yet, the provider's changed . . .”

Leaning against the wall by the door with his arms crossed on his chest was the imperturbable Mitya.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“The first-aid station,” said Mitya.

“But what country?” Aglaya asked.

Mitya glanced in surprise at the woman sitting at the table. She explained: “Typical amnesia.” She turned to face Aglaya. “You're in Moscow. You've got a concussion. You have to lie down for a while, and then we'll send you home.”

Aglaya closed her eyes. Opened them again. And again she saw Mitya and suddenly remembered the district movie theater in Dolgov, the film with Stalin and the young man who had called her a fool. It was the same Mitya. Mitya Lyamikhov, the eternal dissident and opponent of all forms of authority in existence at any particular time.

“Get up now,” said Mitya. “Get up, it's time for you to go.”

He took her to the railroad station and put her in a first-class sleeping compartment as she'd been promised.

99

She couldn't sleep during the journey after all the agitation she'd been through; her head was throbbing and her heart ached. She looked in her bag for some Validol and came across a book. She took it and read the title—
The Timber Camp
—and only then remembered where she'd bought it. She tried reading it to take her mind off things and make the time pass more quickly.

“Have you ever seen a spar pine fall, sawn off at the root?” She read the first phrase and started thinking. She could reply in the affirmative to the question posed. In '35 in response to the Party's appeal, she had worked for three months in the logging camps, and she had seen a thing or two. The people working there were enemies of the people, intellectuals who had never held anything heavier than a pencil in their hands and who therefore suffered very badly from the intense cold and the work that was too heavy for them. Pretty much the way it was in this book. Aglaya had tried reading this novel sometime earlier, but as she recalled, the beginning had been a little different. That is, there was the same Khanty-Mansiisk taiga, with the bitter cold, snow, convicts, armed guards and fallen pine. Only as Aglaya remembered it, the man under the tree had been some Bolshevik called Alexei, and now it was Father Alexii, a priest who had suffered for his faith. Crushed by the pine, he wheezed to the narrator who had gone running across to him: “Read the Holy Gospel. Read our Lord Jesus Christ. Go forth and spread the word of God. And you shall be re——”

Strangely enough, Aglaya became engrossed in the novel. So engrossed that she almost missed her station.

There was no one on the platform with its light dusting of snow apart from the duty guard Pukhov, an elderly, unsober man in a cloth coat with the elbows frayed into holes. The train stood for the two minutes allotted to it, Pukhov blew on his whistle, held out his yellow flag and waved it without looking at the departing carriages. He gestured with his free hand to ask Aglaya to wait. She waited. Seeing Aglaya get off the train, he gestured for her to wait. She waited. Pukhov came up to her, stuck the flag under his arm and held out his hand: “Congratulations.”

“On what?”

“Haven't you heard?” he asked, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“No,” she said irritably. “I haven't. Tell me.”

“Okay, okay, I am telling you.” He jumped up and down and blew on his frozen hands. “Yesterday the district duma . . . your communists . . . voted by an overwhelming majority . . . In the interests of the restoration of historical justice and the preservation of valuable cultural artifacts . . . to put your idol, your tyrant, back where he used to be . . .”

Having uttered these words, Pukhov took a small step backward and froze in anticipation of a violent response, and we could quite legitimately have anticipated something of the sort. For indeed, if Aglaya had been young and in good health, her body would quite certainly have responded to the news in the appropriate fashion—and the amount of adrenaline that suffused her ardent blood, the triumphant chords of the melody that sounded in her ears, would have been beyond our powers to imagine. But her body was old, it functioned listlessly and sporadically, and the news failed to produce the impression it ought to have.

“What are you so pleased about?” she asked. “What's it to you? Are you so fond of Stalin?”

“I'm not fond of him at all,” Pukhov confessed. “But I have my aesthetic considerations. That pedestal standing there smack in the middle of the square like it's lost its way home, it spoils the whole town. Makes you ashamed in front of visitors. It's about time they got around to putting someone on it.”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed indifferently and set off toward the exit, leaving the guard frozen in a pose of bewilderment.

100

In the square in front of the station, a drunken bum with a sparse beard sprinkled with snow sat on the bench under the monument to Lenin, wearing a filthy, leathery sheepskin coat and a knitted woolly hat. He'd been dozing with a bottle in his hand, but the sound of steps woke him and he beckoned Aglaya with his finger, as though inviting her to conspire with him.

“What?” she asked as she got closer.

The bum twisted his head left and right as if he was making sure there were no unwanted eyes or ears around.

“I'm here,” he informed her in a whisper, winking and pointed upward, “purging myself under Lenin in order to journey further into the revolution. Unnerstan'?”

“I understand,” said Aglaya. “And it would be a good idea to give yourself a wash as well.”

She liked the joke she'd made and that made her feel better. She lengthened her stride.

There was no wind, and a fine wet snow was falling.

Aglaya's route lay a little to one side of the Avenue of Glory, but she decided to take a look to see what was going on. The Wheel of Fortune casino had recently been repaired and painted, and it looked festive, not like in the past, when it was the district Party committee building.

“Look at that,” Aglaya thought reproachfully, thinking of the owners of the casino. “All that money they've spent on repairs! But they wouldn't go spending money like that on the district committee.”

And she was right. Not for anything would these people have spent as much money on the district Party committee, the regional Party committee or even on the Central Committee of the CPSU, as they spent on their casinos, restaurants, delicatessens, nightclubs and other establishments.

Strangely enough, the space in front of the casino had so far remained almost unaltered, although the wind of change had snagged a couple of things here too. The district Board of Honor was still standing there, but the oval frames in which the portraits of industrial shock workers had once been displayed as in a columbarium were now empty or contained notices about the sale or purchase of apartments, pedigree puppies and super fat-burners. And on the Avenue of Glory the graves of heroes of the new era had been added to those of heroes of the Revolution, the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. In the seventies they had buried the director of the delicatessen here, in the early eighties two Afghan war veterans, including the fictitious Vanka Zhukov, and just recently they had been joined by the president of the Age with Dignity foundation, known to the criminal world as Validol, and the bank president Mosol. Validol had been blown up by Mosol. Who had got rid of Mosol remained a mystery to the organs, but people who weren't in the organs knew for sure that Felix Bulkin, also known as Plague, a prosperous businessman and politician, was responsible. Both underworld bosses had been buried with full church rites and in grand style. The local hoodlum fraternity had been there, as well as representatives of business circles and the creative intelligentsia. Several colleagues had come down from Moscow in jeeps and Mercedes, but Plague had arrived in a ZIL-114—they said it was the same one Brezhnev used to ride around in. On Validol's grave they placed a marble slab with a Mercedes radiator set into it, and above Mosol's they erected a bronze Prometheus with an eagle welded to his liver.

The other graves—Commissar Rosenblum, Captain Miliagi and Andrei Revkin—had fallen into a state of neglect, but right now they were sprinkled with snow and didn't look too bad.

Aglaya could see from a distance that there was a crowd jostling on the square. The vision called to mind memories from fifty years earlier, when they unveiled the monument. But what could be going on there now?

She approached the crowd. People were standing in several rows in a semicircle. The ones at the back were standing on tiptoe as they tried to see what was happening up at the front. Aglaya touched the rounded shoulders of the woman muffled up in a shawl who was standing in front of her and asked her what was going on.

“The devil's marrying a pig,” said the woman, turning to face her. It was Shurochka the Idiot.

“Don't talk rubbish,” whispered the man standing beside Shurochka, and he explained that the pedestal was being blessed on the eve of the statue being returned to its rightful place. Aglaya pushed her way farther forward and saw Father Radish clad in full vestments walking around the pedestal with a cross in his left hand and something that looked like a house-painter's brush in his right. Shuffling along beside the priest with a tin bucket was the ancient deacon Father Pyotr Porosyaninov. The priest dipped his brush in the bucket, splashed water onto the pedestal and intoned: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost is this blessing made of the pedestal for the image of the Servant of God Joseph, which shall stand here henceforth, always and forever more. Amen!”

The ceremony was attended by the head of the district administration, Zherdyk, the chairman of the municipal duma, the heads of the district offices of the police, the FSB (Federal Security Service) and the public prosecutor's office, the chairman of the district court, the commanding officer of the local garrison, the president of the agricultural bank, Plague and two other professional criminals, and a man in a threadbare coat, very thin with a yellowish-green face, big eyes and long, matted gray hair that hung down from under a battered hat. Aglaya had the feeling that she'd seen this man somewhere before, perhaps in some former life. The congregation listened to the priest patiently, with the same resignation with which they had once listened to Party reports about the fulfillment of plans and the imminent advent of communism. With the single difference that then they had applauded after every figure cited, but now at the appropriate points they jerked their heads down and crossed themselves rapidly and clumsily. The yellowish-green old man did this more fervently and more frequently than the others.

When he had finished the rite, the priest put the brush in the bucket, handed the cross to Porosyaninov and addressed the congregation with an informal sermon, in which he gave a brief account of Stalin's life.

“It was,” he said, “the complicated life of a complicated man. In his youth he decided to dedicate himself to God and entered a seminary, but afterward, tempted by the devil, he was seduced by a false satanic creed and turned his back on God. But we can say that the devil was not able to master him completely. As you remember, during the war, when our motherland was in great danger, it was Stalin who gave orders for the church to be allowed greater freedom. God moves in mysterious ways, and the paths that bring man to God are unpredictable. And we cannot tell what point this undoubtedly sinful man would have reached if his life had only been longer.”

The priest also remarked that the installation of the monument and even its blessing did not constitute forgiveness of the sins of the man to whom it was dedicated.

“The blessing of the statue does not signify its transformation into a holy shrine, but it is a historical relic, and the church facilitates its standing secure here for a long time. So that there should be no more of the blasphemy to which we have all been witnesses.”

In conclusion, the priest made the sign of the cross over the pedestal once again and everybody crossed themselves, following which he gathered up the skirts of his cassock and he and Porosyaninov set off toward his four-wheel drive Niva. Zherdyk came over to ask Aglaya how things had gone in Moscow, and then said with pride:

“Now you see, Aglaya Stepanovna, you see, but you didn't believe that there would ever be dancing on our street again. But there will. Tomorrow. And there's nobody and nothing that can stop it,” Zherdyk assured her, and as he walked away, he began singing gently under his breath: “La donna è mobile . . .”