Monumental Propaganda (5 page)

10

The children's home was located in an old mansion fronted by six columns. It had once belonged to the marshal of the local nobility. Judging from the general decrepitude of the façade and the peeling paint of the columns, the building had not been repaired even once since those times. But it was one of the few valuable structures that had not been damaged in the war.

After forcing her way through two heavy doors, Aglaya entered the front hall, and the first thing that caught her eye was the wall newspaper “Happy Childhood.” Sveta Zhurkina, a pupil from Class Seven B, was standing in front of the newspaper with her tongue sticking out in the general direction of her left ear and copying something into a notebook. Catching sight of Aglaya, she said hello, closed her notebook with an embarrassed gesture and left.

The pupil's behavior seemed suspicious to Aglaya. She walked over to the wall newspaper and froze as she looked at it. The verse text that Zhurkina had not actually finished copying out was in the third column, after a leading article devoted to the education of young people through labor.

The poem, bearing no signature, was called “And We Believed in You So Much.” It contained reproaches addressed to a certain military commander (who was not named, but it was clear to everyone that Stalin was meant). It said the commander had led us from victory to victory, but at the same time abused our boundless trust by committing deeds of great wickedness. The final stanza contained an expression of the author's profound disenchantment with his former devotion to the commander, but also the optimistic hope that in the future everything would be different. The verse concluded with a polemical question: “The ascent does not always go smoothly when storming a peak that is new. I believe in collective reason, I believe in the Party. Do you?”

The strip of paper with the poem was poorly glued on—evidently with mashed potato. Or starch. Or simply spit. Aglaya grabbed hold of the paper by a corner that had come away and tore it off, crumpling it up like a snake, and strode off quickly toward her office. The secretary, Rita, was squinting into a little mirror and plucking her eyebrows with tweezers. Seeing Aglaya Stepanovna come in, she leapt to her feet.

“Good morning, Aglaya Stepanovna. Have you recovered?”

“I have,” Aglaya said grumpily. “Where's Shubkin?”

“He was fussing around here just a moment ago. I think he went to the dormitory to check that the girls have made up their beds properly.”

“Tell him to come and see me,” she ordered, and disappeared into her office.

She tossed the piece of paper onto the floor. Picked it up. Put it on the table. Tossed it down again and picked it up again. She took off her coat and began striding rapidly from one corner of the office to the other. But she immediately felt tired, began panting for breath and sweating. She was still weak, after all. Hearing voices in the outer office, she sat down at her desk and assumed a stony expression.

Mark Semyonovich Shubkin was a man of about fifty with a large physique, growing plump and balding, with the fresh complexion that is shared by rural residents and convicts. He also just happened to look like Lenin. He was a lot taller, but just like Lenin he had an absolutely massive head that was, so he claimed, a size ten.

He worked as class teacher with the preschool children's group and edited the wall newspaper by way of community service. This work had been entrusted to him without due caution. No one else would volunteer to run the newspaper, and ever since Shubkin got his hands on it, he had constantly published his own poems and comments. Which could in fact have been regarded as a considerable honor for the newspaper. Dolgov had its own poets—Butylko, Raspadov and so forth—but they had never risen any higher than the regional press, whereas Shubkin at the age of thirty had been printed (would you believe it!) in
Izvestiya, Komsomolskaya Pravda
and
Ogonyok.

“Come over to the desk,” Aglaya ordered without replying to Shubkin's greeting. “Who wrote this trash?” Her lips twisted in a grimace of disgust and she gestured with her eyes to the strip of paper curled into a spiral.

Shubkin reached out a hand, but thought better of it before picking up the paper.

“I don't catch your meaning,” he said, giving Aglaya a meek look.

“I'm asking you,” she repeated, tapping her fingers on the table, “who wrote this trash?”

“Do you mean this poem?” he asked, inviting her to correct her terminology.

“I mean this trash,” said Aglaya Stepanovna, standing her ground.

“This po-po-poem,” said Shubkin, beginning to stammer in his agitation, “was written by me.”

“And who gave you permission to write this trash?” she repeated with uncompromising hostility.

“I was per-permitted to write this tra-trash by the Pa-Pa-Party,” said Shubkin, turning pale and thrusting out his chest.

“Oh, the Pa-Pa-Party,” Aglaya mocked him. “The Party gave you permission. No, my dear friend, the Party does not yet permit you to write all sorts of garbage and exploit an important theme for your own ends. See what I'm going to do with this garbage, look.” The tiny scraps of paper went flying to the floor. “If you think the Twentieth Congress abolished the general line, you are mistaken. The Party has been obliged to introduce a few corrections, but we will not allow anyone to doubt the fundamentals. Stalin was and still is the mind, honor and conscience of our epoch. Was and is. That's all there is to it. And if someone up there happens to say something about him, it doesn't mean that everyone will be allowed to do it. What are things coming to!” She was gradually calming down. “Everyone writing whatever comes into his head. ‘I believe in collective reason.' What a true believer! If you're such a great satirist, why don't you write about the trash bins. They're standing out there without any lids, giving off a stink; it's unsanitary, there are flies. How many times do I have to tell them to make lids? I've already slapped two reprimands on the building manager and I'll hit him with a third one soon, a severe reprimand with a caution, but he couldn't care less. If you're such a talented satirist, why don't you turn the force of your satire against the trash bins?”

Shubkin turned even paler and drew himself up, offended. “I don't wish to turn my satire against the bi-bi-bins. I wa-wa-want to turn its force against Sta-sta-sta . . .”

“I understand,” said Aglaya, putting an end to the interview. “You're sacked. Collect your pay at the accounts office tomorrow.”

11

As a matter of fact, she'd seen right through this character long ago. Back when he'd come looking for a job. She'd had no teacher of literature at the time, and then he'd turned up out of the blue. With a first-class diploma from IPLI—the Institute of Philosophy and Literature—the very place where many of our outstanding personalities had studied before the war, including the poet Tvardovsky and the first secretary of the Komsomol central committee, Shelepin.

“Well I never!” Aglaya said in amazement, eyeing the diploma. “What distinguished people we have honoring this backwater of ours!”

For the reasons explained above, people with college-level education were to be found in Dolgov, but someone like this was a rare find.

“And where did you work after the institute?”

“In a logging camp,” Shubkin said simply.

“Why?” she asked, then immediately realized she had said something stupid; there was no need to ask.

And while he was spinning her some complicated yarn about unjustified repression and things being carried to extremes, she had already made up her mind.

“I see,” she interrupted him, “and why exactly have you come to us?”

“Well, in the first place because I saw the announcement, in the second place I have the right qualifications and in the third place”—he paused deliberately and turned his eyes up slightly—“I am very fond of children.”

“Everybody's fond of children,” Aglaya remarked. “Especially,” she said with emphasis, “our Soviet children”—meaning “ours, not yours.” “Do you have any children of your own, by the way?”

“No,” said Shubkin, as if he was apologizing for something. “I never had any. Because . . . you understand.”

“Of course,” she said charitably. “That's quite understandable. But”— she shrugged and spread her arms—“unfortunately we don't have a job for you.”

And making it clear that the conversation was at an end, she had begun reaching into the pack for her next Belomor.

But he had been in no hurry to leave.

“But you just said that you do have a job.”

“I did say so, but I can see that you have insufficient teaching experience. Your educational qualifications, of course, are very high. Perhaps even too high for us. But we have a specific context here. We have difficult children, without parents. It would be better for you to try an ordinary school for a start.”

Clearly, the words about his lack of teaching experience were merely an excuse. In actual fact, she had refused Shubkin because she did not like people like him. She knew for certain that nobody ended up “there”—the camps—for nothing. Her logic followed a well-known line of reasoning: I've lived my life honestly and no one put me in prison. And they didn't put this person or that person away either. But if someone was put away, there's no smoke without fire, it was for something. Granted, times are different now. The socialist order is firmly established and the Party is strong; it can be a little more indulgent with its enemies. It can shorten their sentences and give them jobs. But to trust characters like that with the education of future generations is something that can never be allowed under any circumstances.

However, she had been corrected.

It had been yet another sign of the changes that were brewing. Shubkin had complained to the DDPE—the District Department of Public Education—and from there the order had come down: Give him a job. Aglaya had obeyed, only instead of appointing the new staff member to teach the senior classes, as he had requested, she had assigned him to the oldest preschool group.

But she had continued to regard him with suspicion. She did not like the fact that he told his little wards stories about all sorts of flitty-flies, ugly ducklings, little goats, little pigs and wolves.

“If you have to tell them about these little pigs,” she lectured him, “then at least set them on an ideological foundation. Explain that the little pigs are the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the gray wolf is who?”

“Who is he?” asked Shubkin, who had his own ideas on that point.

“The gray wolf,” Aglaya explained, “is American imperialism.”

“But the children are still too young to understand things like that,” Shubkin had protested.

“It's good they're still so young. Little children assimilate things quicker.”

Shubkin had kept silent, but she could see in his eyes that he disagreed. She suspected Shubkin was deliberately smuggling in alien ideology under the guise of those little pigs of his. And strangely enough—we shall come back to this later—she was more or less right.

Now Shubkin's behavior and his poem had convinced Aglaya that his past record was no accident. He'd been lying low before, but now look, he'd crept out from his crevice, like a cockroach—forgotten about his little goats and pigs and launched a direct attack against the holy of holies.

12

She soon discovered that Shubkin was not alone in his endeavors. In the District Department of Public Education, to which he complained once again, they refused to confirm her order. She decided to visit the director herself.

When she entered the office, Bogdan Filippovich Nechitailo was sitting there under the portraits of Lenin and Krupskaya. He was late middle-aged, a sad-looking man dressed in a cotton jacket and a dark shirt with the top button unfastened. At the time described here many district-level bosses lived poorly and dressed badly because their pay was not very high and they immediately squandered all their bribes on drink—and anyway, how many bribes does a deputy head of a district department of public education get?

Unshaven and inebriated, Nechitailo was folding the newspaper
Pravda
into something resembling a little book with fingers stained yellow by tobacco smoke.

“I've come to see you,” said Aglaya, lingering in the doorway as she suddenly felt her courage fail her.

“I can see you've come to see me,” said Nechitailo with a nod. “There's no one in here,” he said, turning his head this way and that, “apart from myself. So tell me, Aglaya Stepanovna, in what way can I, for instance, be of assistance to yourself?”

While Aglaya presented the essential facts, he finished folding up his little book, tore one page out of it, curved it into a little trough and reached out for a silk tobacco pouch lying in front of him with an intricately embroidered, faded inscription: SMOKE AND DON'T COUGH. This pouch of his contained homegrown tobacco—in other words, the kind that people used to grow, dry and shred themselves. If they shredded it with the roots, they got relatively weak shag or makhorka, but if only the leaves went into the mix, it could be so strong that it made the most inveterate smokers cough and choke, with tears spurting from their eyes as if they were clowns in the circus. This tobacco was popularly known as “samson,” and there was a widespread belief that in young men it stimulated sexual activity and in old men, sleep, although it is hard to imagine that any regular smoker of such poison had even the slightest chance of living to be an old man. Nechitailo took a generous pinch of samson out of the pouch, scattered it evenly along his curved trough, moistened the edge of the paper with spittle and chewed it with his front teeth to make it stick better, twisted together a tightly packed roll-up as thick as his thumb and took out of his pocket a cigarette lighter made from a rifle cartridge with a little wheel at the side.

“Frontline souvenir,” he said to Aglaya, and struck the flame. There was a smell of bad tobacco and burning paper. Nechitailo struggled to light his roll-up, his eyes popping out of his head and his cheeks flapping in and out, making sounds like a steam engine: “Chuff-choo, chuff-choo, chuff-choo.”

As Nechitailo puffed away, the tobacco crackled and snapped, scattering sparks in every direction. When the roll-up eventually lit, Bogdan Filippovich inhaled with relish and began to cough, wheezing as if he were in his death agony, and disappeared for a while in a swirling, dark gray mass.

“And so,” Aglaya concluded her story, “I'm asking you, is it really possible to allow a man like Shubkin to be involved in educating our Soviet children?”

“Yes, I think it is,” she heard a voice say out of the smoke, which by this time had begun to disperse, and Nechitailo emerged from it like an airplane out of a cloud. “I think it is possible,” he repeated, holding the roll-up in his left hand and waving away the smoke with his right, “and in general let me tell you, Comrade Revkina, approximately the following. As you know, the Party's new policy emphasizes a considerate attitude toward personnel. Not the way things used to be—the slightest thing and off with his head. People have to be treated what I'd call humanely. Especially people like Shubkin. You could call him a man of unique intellect. He has two college-level educations, speaks twelve languages fluently and can use all the rest with a dictionary. And his memory is simply phenomenal. I can tell you he rattles off by heart the
Odyssey
”—Nechitailo bent down his little finger—“the
Iliad
”—he bent down his ring finger and went on bending down the rest of his fingers and thumbs as he ran through his list—“
Eugene Onegin,
Mendeleev's periodic table, the ‘evergreen' chess game, the ‘Song of the Stormy Petrel,' the fourth chapter of the
History of the CPSU
(B.) and Lenin's work ‘What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats.' I didn't believe it myself, Aglaya Stepanovna, but I followed him with the text and he just reeled it all off, word for word straight out of his head. You see! Not just a head, you might say, more like an entire Council of Ministers.”

“But Comrade Stalin,” said Aglaya, “taught us that the cleverer the enemy is, the more dangerous he is.”

“Why are you talking to me about Comrade Stalin?” Bogdan Filippovich sighed and took another drag, started coughing again and leaned toward the desk, clutching at his chest. “Comrade Stalin”—he coughed again—“as we know now, made a few mistakes of his own. During the war he even used a globe to command our forces. He used to spin the globe and say, Take this town here for the October anniversary, and this one, he'd say, for Red Army Day. And how to take it, which side to approach it from, where to move up the reserves, all that, he says, is no concern of mine, I'm the Supreme Commander, he says, and I command supremely. Understand? And let Zhukov or Tolbukhin think about the details.”

“Nonsense!” said Aglaya angrily. “Comrade Stalin was a genius and he had a close personal grasp of all the details.”

“Aha,” said Nechitailo, sounding bored. “Aglaya Stepanovna, I'm not going to get involved in an ideological debate with you. Especially since the leadership of our Party has a different opinion.”

“What about you?” Aglaya asked in a less formal tone. “Do you have an opinion of your own?”

“I do,” Nechitailo assured her. “But like the opinion of every honest communist, it's no different from the opinion of our supreme leadership. And therefore I declare your order dismissing Shubkin—how shall I put it—null and void. That means,” he concluded decisively, stubbing out his butt in the ashtray, “that tomorrow morning he can turn up for work.”

Aglaya realized there was nothing more to be said and she got up from her chair.

“Very well!” she said in a threatening tone, although any threat was quite pointless. “Very well!”

And as she left the room, she tried to slam the door as loudly as possible.

Nechitailo sat there for a while until she had gone, said “Idiot,” shook his head and began manufacturing another roll-up.