Mother Russia (16 page)

When he finally musters enough force to speak, Pravdin’s voice
is
hoarse. “I tell you—” he says. He closes his eyes and sits motionless for a long moment. “I tell you,” he begins again, “that lovemaking makes the time stand still for me. You think a moment, reply, ‘Pleasure is a clock like any other.’ “

“What a cynical thing for me to say,” Nadezhda writes. “I look old but I talk young.”

They sleep again, Nadezhda tossing restlessly, Pravdin deep into a dreamless pit from which he has trouble emerging when it grows gray. At breakfast Mother Russia lays out yogurts, wheat germ cereal, a steaming bowl of Lapsang Suchong made from teabags Nadezhda picked up from a diplomat’s wife in exchange for some photographs of her children.

“I got off another zinger to Singer,” Zoya informs them conversationally. “This one’s a time bomb. I told him people in an industrial society lose a sense of who they are and begin to see themselves as others see them, which is why we are all of us so different depending on whom we are with. I also told him I was an observer but only in the sense that his fellow American A. Toklas was an observer, which is to say she liked a view but she liked to sit with her back turned to it. I told him that that was the only way to look at things and stay sane.”

“If you sit with your back turned,” complains Pravdin, “you can’t see where you’re going.”

“Even with your back not turned,” Zoya argues, “you can’t see where you’re going. Anatole France, who was a
charming sentimentalist before his tongue turned acid, once said something about how the future was hidden from the men who make it. To which I say, thanks God. If they could see where they were going they’d lose interest in the trip.”

“The future,” writes Nadezhda, “is like seeing yourself in a mirror with your hair parted on the wrong side.”

“Every time I look in a mirror,” Pravdin remarks, “nobody is whom I half expect to see looking back.” He smiles self-consciously. “Up to now there’s always been somebody: me with my medals on the wrong side of my Eisenhower jacket. Touch wood.” (His knuckles rap on the kitchen table.)

“There aren’t many people left who touch wood,” observes Zoya.

“There aren’t many people left who have wood to touch,” says Pravdin.

“Not funny,” groans Zoya.

“Not meant to be,” replies Pravdin.

“People don’t touch wood,” explains Zoya, “because they’re no longer superstitious. The decline of superstition, if you want my opinion, is one of the tragedies of our epoch. If you are interested in the why, it’s because psychoanalysis has occupied the ground it left vacant. The social unit of the future, if there is a future, will be the Therapeutic State in which the principal requirement for the position of Big Brother will be an M.D. degree. Ha! Those medical Attilas, with their ugly little hearts contorted like fists, will run the world as if it were one long umbilical ward.”

“Waak, waak, power to
the powerful
, power to the powerful,” comes from Mother Russia’s bedroom.

“If I had to bet,” Nadezhda writes, “I’d bet the future will be futureless.”

“Not funny,” Pravdin scribbles on her napkin.

“Not meant to be,” she prints, in all capitals, under his scrawl.

Zoya regards Pravdin with a mixture of shrewdness and affection. “Our new attic reminds me more and more of my late, silly, beautiful husband. An idealism just beyond articulation illuminated his actions the way cities over the horizon light up the night sky long before you actually see them.”

“Idealism is an ideal,” protests Pravdin, “not a formula for everyday survival.”

“You tried that out on me already,” Zoya chides him. “I didn’t believe you then, I don’t believe you now. You’re a closet idealist.”

Pravdin wipes the wheat germ off his chin with his hand, adds milk to his tea, blows on it, bends his head down to the glass and noisily sips. “What you want to see, little mother, you see. When I was young, a problem child is what I was: Narcissus, Onan and Oedipus rolled into one. A problem man is what I grew into. In summer I used to haunt the banks of the Moscow River looking for lovers who swam naked, then swiped the clothes they left on the banks. The thefts were never reported because the militia frowned on naked swimming and advertise is what people didn’t do.”

Nadezhda, preoccupied with dark thoughts, absently stuffs into her carryall an old Leica, two lenses, spare film, her wallet, a notebook with measurements of all her friends (if she comes across hard-to-get items of clothing, she will buy for everyone), starts for the door, changes her mind, comes marching back, writes with determination on her pad: “Enough is enough. For God’s sake give them the manuscripts and be done with it.”

“You’re off your rocker,” says Pravdin, pushing the note away.

“What did I say,” Zoya cries jubilantly. “A closet idealist!
You light up the night sky from over the horizon.” She scrapes her chair closer to Pravdin’s, takes in her wrinkled fingers the lapel of his Eisenhower jacket, whispers urgently: “Unarmed truth can defeat even the seventy-first incarnation of God.”

“Waak:, waak, power
to the powerful
, power to
the powerful
The bird lands on the bowl of fruit on top of the refrigerator, preens, pleased with its short flight. “Waak, waak.”

“The Writers’ Congress is the perfect platform,” Zoya insists confidently. “Confront them with the facts, they’ll have to listen.” Her eyes become watery with excitement. Her fingers cling weakly to his lapel. She says harshly: “What are Chuvash and Melor against the likes of you. Confuse them is all you have to do. Become two personages yourself: one who wants to drop the whole thing and give back the manuscripts; the other a stubborn bastard who walks on water, moves mountains, works up a sweat from a noneconomic activity!”

“Two personages is what I am already,” Pravdin announces morbidly. “I’m the hustler and the hustled.” He is frustrated by his inability to shrug; this would be the perfect moment. “Schizophrenia is an idea whose time has obviously come.”

Nadezhda shakes her head angrily, writes, “Two can be arrested as cheaply as one,” drops the note in Pravdin’s plate, stalks from the kitchen.

Pravdin pushes away the plate as if it contains a bill he doesn’t want to pay, grabs a pepper grinder and thrusts it in front of Mother Russia’s mouth. “In your opinion, Zoya Aleksandrovna, what is the most important problem facing the world today?”

Mother Russia responds instantly. “Ha!” she cackles, “that’s deliciously simple: it’s population control. If you ask me, the government should drape the Kremlin with giant posters that say, ‘Have Cats, Not Brats.’ Between you, me and
the wall, who are the three listening to my every word, Hemingway is the only cat lover in all of history I loathe. But that’s another story.”

“Waak:, waak, help, help,” barks Pravdin. But his sinking heart isn’t in the game.

Pravdin, cooling his heels on a wooden bench with initials carved all over it, stares at the small hand-lettered sign (“Department of Medicine, Moscow University”) until the letters blur and he loses a sense of where he is, who he is even.

“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” an inner voice reminds him, “
Homo Economicus with
a jackpot mentality, hustler with the instincts of a victim, gate-crasher with a taste for black Beluga, graffitist who can turn watchstraps into sandals but not water into wine, shrugless in Gaza, a light sleeper and a heavy dreamer, no closet anything, vaguely aware of a covenant with God but suspicious that the Party of the First Part is not holding up His end of the Deal, and so forth and so on.”

He suspends the inventory, glances at his two wrist-watches, sees he’s been waiting already two hours, carves with a small pocketknife in the wooden bench:

Patience is a form of despair

(Anon: Pravdin has spent the better part of his life despairing). Twenty minutes later the report Pravdin has come for is presented to him by a secretary. It says:

Analysis of a cotton toothpick, prepared under the auspices of the Department of Medicine, Moscow University
.

1. The cotton toothpick consists of a sliver of wood, eight centimeters in length, with tufts of cotton weighing approximately .07 gram, glued to each end.

2. With respect to the proposal to use the cotton toothpick to
remove wax from the concha area of the ear, the following points should be taken into consideration:

a. while it is considered possible to remove the wax with the implement under analysis,

b. certain risks are involved, most notably the possibility of damage to the internal auditory meatus or a puncture of the inner ear caused by too profound insertion of the cotton toothpick.

3. Conclusion: While wax-free ears are considered desirable in an advanced industrial society, they are clearly not indispensable. Furthermore, the presence of the wax does not constitute in itself a sufficient health hazard to warrant running risks to remove it. In severe cases, when quantities of wax are allowed to build up, a slight infringement of auditory ability has resulted. This can be overcome by:

a. turning up the volume of the sound source.

b. removing the wax with traditional methods, i.e. keys, fingernails (only women’s nails are considered sufficiently long for this purpose), which have lower risk quotients than the cotton toothpick in question.

Prepared, this date by
A. N. Kulakova,
candidate examiner,
eyes, ears, nose, throat
and sexual problems section.

Reviewed and approved,
this date, by N. R.
Prornik, chief of section,
eyes, ears, nose, throat
and sexual problems.

“What’s this sudden lust for traditional methods,” Pravdin explodes, tapping the sheet with the back of his hand. The
secretary, a matronly woman in a white coat two sizes too large for her, backs away. “What do they do for fun in the eyes, ears, nose, throat and sexual problems section,” Pravdin yells after her, “swab throats with skeleton keys? Conduct gynecological examinations with the back of soup spoons?” A maniacal look comes into his eyes and he hefts his briefcase as if he is about to use it as a weapon. The woman cowers inside her white coat, turns her shoulder and peers at him over it.

“No offense meant,” she says softly, “but you’re crazy.”

“Ha!” cries Pravdin, dancing menacingly back and forth across her field of vision. “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Yes or maybe?” His rust hair flies off in all directions, giving to him the appearance of an agitated conductor. He scrapes what he can from an ear with a fingernail and thrusts it under her nose. “Nothing is what you remove from an ear with a fingernail,” he screams. “Nothing
is no thing
.”

Two interns in white coats escort him from the building. “Temper is what anybody can lose,” Pravdin explains as they push him into the revolving door, rotate the panels, spill him into the street. Pravdin straightens his Eisenhower jacket, adjusts the four medals overlapping on his breast, brushes off non-existent lint from his sleeves, moistens a finger with saliva and writes on the glass wall of the entrance to the university:

(Anon: Pravdin has a flash image of himself as a Bedouin-robed Old Testament Isaiah anticipating the coming of the Suffering Servant). The two interns read what Pravdin has written, look at each other, start toward the revolving door, but he skips away into the crowd and disappears.

Red Square is cordoned off by police barriers; peasant women in layers of dark clothing are beginning to scrub down the
cobblestones for the May Day pass in review. The buildings on Gorky Street, in the other direction, are draped with giant red banners, each containing some bit of socialist graffiti. “High moral qualities are the bricks with which we build Communism,” proclaims one. Another says, “Peace” in fourteen languages. Pravdin drifts into a group of Bulgarians snapping pictures of Red Square over the barrier, interests one in a Swiss watch that registers seconds, minutes, hours and the phases of the moon.

“How much?” the tourist demands, testing the expanding band.

“Not for sale,” Pravdin mumbles. “For trade.”

“What do I have that you want?” the Bulgarian asks in puzzlement.

“The ability to shrug,” whines Pravdin, snatches back the watch, dances away toward the main offices of the All-Soviet Proletarian Savings Bank.

“If you want to open an account,” snaps the thin man behind an enormous desk, looking up reluctantly from his papers, “it’s window seven.”

“Settling accounts, not opening them, is what I’m interested in,” Pravdin explains, advancing on the man like a lava flow, depositing his briefcase on his desk. “It’s this way: Socialism has done so much for me, I want to return the principal with the interest. So I’m here to give you a new twist to the savings game, something into which you could branch.” Pravdin takes a deep breath, leans forward, speaks confidentially. “Sperm banks are an idea whose time has come. Before you can build communism you must construct socialism. Before socialism, an advanced industrial society. And who ever heard of an advanced industrial society without sperm banks!” Pravdin climbs across the desk in excitement. “Thesis: overpopulation. Antithesis: vasectomies. Synthesis:” Pravdin shouts it out in a weary voice “sperm banks,
where men can deposit their seeds in case they have second thoughts.”