Mother Russia (17 page)

The thin man behind the desk stabs wildly at the intercom buttons. A woman, then a uniformed guard, then two other men, come running. “Get him out of here!” the thin man cries hysterically.

“A deposit is all I wanted to make,” pleads Pravdin, shrinking back against a wall, protecting his crotch with his briefcase.

“You should be in an asylum,” the thin man yells after him as the four employees escort him toward the exit.

“I am already,” Pravdin flings over his shoulder, “is what the problem is.”

Pravdin, the collar of his Eisenhower jacket turned up against a chill that isn’t in the air, huddles in a doorway across the street from the Writers’ Congress auditorium. Traffic thins out. Street lights come on. He starts to cross the street, tiptoeing around pools of light as if he is trying to avoid getting his basketball sneakers wet, when Friedemann T. rushes out of the night.

“Be a good fellow, don’t say hello before I speak, don’t say good-bye after I finish, only listen with both your ears,” he instructs Pravdin, holding up a pudgy palm to silence him. “I was told I would find you here, which is how come our paths cross. I was told to tell you only this: Return the originals, burn the photocopy, and an exit visa for Israel will arrive in the mail the next day.”

Pravdin starts to protest but Friedemann T. waves his hand in his face. “No, no, no, no, no, I don’t know what they’re talking about, so for God’s sake don’t tell me.” He turns to the empty street and calls out: “He didn’t say anything, as God is my witness.” To Pravdin: “For God’s sake, give them what they want.” Holding his overcoat on his agitated
shoulders with trembling fingers, he hurries off down the middle of the street without another word.

“Yourself is whom you should have sexual intercourse with,” Pravdin calls out to the retreating figure. He laughs nervously under his breath, surveys the walls for ears. “Onanism is an idea whose time has come,” he yells, pauses for an echo that never returns. “Before you can have an advanced industrial society, you have to have a society.” Pravdin does a silent jig under a street lamp, crosses over walking squarely on the pools of light, pushes through the heavy door into the lobby of the auditorium, presents his ticket to the usher guarding the entrance. “Don’t tell me there is no Pravdin,” he warns the usher when he appears to hesitate, “because you have the honor of having him before your very obsolete body.”

The usher studies the ticket. “This is blue,” he observes coolly. “Tonight is not blue. Tonight is green. Blue won’t get you the time of day.”

“The time of day is what I already have,” Pravdin mutters, snapping the expanding bands of his watches for emphasis, “along with the month, the fiscal year and diurnal tides in the Philippine Sea.”

Pravdin retreats into the street, scurries around the corner, turns into an alleyway, peeks in the stage door entrance of the auditorium. “Pssssssssst,” he summons an old man sitting on a high stool, “have they started without me?”

“Oh, my, yes,” the old man confirms the worst. “They’ve been at it for ten or fifteen minutes.”

“I rush back like a madman from the short-hair symposium in Stockholm and they start without me,” Pravdin complains bitterly. “Between us,” he confides, flinging an arm over the old man’s shoulder, “the vanguard of the proletariat has no respect for the rear guard of the proletariat is what the trouble is.”

“I never mix in politics,” the old man apologizes.

“Smart move,” Pravdin tells him. He pads silently to the wings of the stage and regards the seven men and two women, each with a microphone planted on the table in front of them, who stare out at the eerily quiet audience. All nine fidget uncomfortably on straight-backed plastic chairs like chain-smokers in a no-smoking compartment.

“And so,” the chairman of the Writers’ Union, a stoop-shouldered short-story writer, is telling the audience, “we must acquire the possibility of differentiating between realism that is realistic, inasmuch as it portrays proletarian life in a positive fashion, and realism that is nonrealistic, inasmuch as it arbitrarily focuses on those portions of proletarian life which are atypical and thus portrays our society in a negative fashion.” The chairman pauses to moisten his dry lips with a dry tongue, pulls the microphone closer to his face, continues; his voice is toneless; he reads from file cards without looking up at his audience. “What then is the role of the artist in a socialist society? The role of an artist in a socialist society is to act as a cultural fulcrum: to serve as a balancing point between the aspirations that originate from below and the directionality that originates from above. Under these conditions, any artist—”

The wind-up Don Quixote emerges from the wings, pivots mechanically toward a large floor electric fan that isn’t running, changes its mind, rumbles under the table, lance extended, and starts down the line of legs. The two women sitting at the end nearest Pravdin scrape back their chairs in panic. One of the men ducks under the table, comes up with the Quixote tightly in his grip, passes it to the chairman, who waves it over his head and angrily cries, “Who is responsible for this? Who is responsible for this?”

“Cervantes, Miguel de,” announces Pravdin, speaking into the microphone abandoned by the first woman panelist.
He turns toward the audience, is blinded by the spotlights that stab down at him from every side. “Comrade writers,” Pravdin begins nervously. He swallows several times, reminds himself,
What we are here is literary. “Comrade writers
,” he starts again in a stronger voice. “Proof positive, in the form of original manuscripts, is what I have to prove that Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov is a plagiarist.”

Pravdin squints into the spotlights, strains to catch some reaction from the audience: a shuffling of feet, gasps, coughs, anything. The chairman, the others on the platform, regard Pravdin coldly but make no move to interrupt him. “Comrade writers,” Pravdin pleads, “it’s this way: Before you appears a nobody to fill your ears with things you don’t want to hear, to beg you to walk on water, move mountains, work up a sweat from a noneconomic activity. Here is the evidence”—Pravdin holds high the photocopies of the manuscript—“that a senior Soviet citizen has taken credit for something someone else wrote. So on one side, yours truly Robespierre Pravdin, a shrugless Quixote with unarmed truth. So on the other”—Pravdin gestures with his head toward the nine—“the vanguard of the vanguard, with their Maginot mentalities, holding the fort in crumbling cultural blockhouses.”

Pravdin, unnerved by the utter silence that reverberates like a silent echo through the hall, takes a step backward, glances quickly toward the wings to make sure the stage door is still there. “What you can do is you can circumcise your hearts,” he continues, “or you can pierce your inner ears so as not to hear what you don’t want to hear. More to say I don’t have. I thank you, very fine ladies and gentlemen.”

The diaphragms on the spotlights close. Overhead, enormous crystal chandeliers glimmer dimly, brighten, flood the hall. Pravdin, pale as death in the white light, is suddenly chilled to the marrow of his brittle bones; he sees why there
has been no reaction from the audience: a completely empty house is what he’s been playing to.

“Aiiiiiiiii,” he cries, sweaty and weak and unfortunately wide awake.

“You talk too much,” sneers the chairman, packing away his filing cards.

“Waak, waak,” barks Pravdin, “
rev-lutions are verbose, rev-Iutions are verbose
.”

CHAPTER 8

“How empty?”
demands Mother Russia …

“How empty?” demands Mother Russia. “Empty how?”

“Empty as in nobody there.” Pravdin is snappy, irritated. He shivers, chilled by a wind not blowing, glances over his shoulder for the hundredth time.

“I wish to God you’d stop that,” Zoya tells him. “It makes me nervous, and when I’m nervous I need to pass water all the time. If they want to follow us, let them for God’s sake. Be like me. Ha! Nowadays when they open my letters they don’t even bother sealing them professionally; they close them with transparent tape. But do I get all worked up? I shrug it off.”

“I can’t shrug,” notes Pravdin.

“Shrug mentally,” Zoya orders, “and stop looking back.”

“I look back,” Pravdin explains, “because I’m trying to turn them into pillars of salt.”

“Very funny,” says Zoya.

“Meant to be,” says Pravdin.

Nadezhda tears off a page from her pad, passes it to Pravdin. “Couldn’t you see it was empty?”

“All I saw were spotlights,” he says wearily. “I assumed there were people there because I saw the chairman talking to them.”

“What were his nails like?” Zoya wants to know.

“His nails were the last thing I would have noticed,” Pravdin fires back.

“Don’t jump on me,” Zoya retorts.

“I’m not jumping,” protests Pravdin.

“Apology accepted,” says Zoya. “Dear Robespierre,” she adds, linking her arm through his, “you were a dear man to even try. Here, this way”—she turns down a pathway between the rows of tombstones—“it’s just over here.” She stops before a worn stone with a legend eroded by time and lays a small bouquet of forget-me-nots on the mound of earth. “Here,” she announces in a voice trembling with emotion, “repose the decaying bones of the poet Sergei Yesenin, who kissed me on the neck one wild, passionate night in 1925 and slashed his wrists in a moment of boredom the next. The funeral was incredible. Tears ran into the gutter in rivulets. Four women swooned. A sidewalk vendor made a fortune peddling smelling salts. From the limb of that tree a young woman named Galya hanged herself. I myself was inconsolable for two or three days.”

Pravdin moves closer, makes out the dates on the headstone. “How come you put the flowers today when tomorrow is the anniversary of his death?” he asks.

“I prefer to commemorate the kiss,” Zoya insists coquettishly.

Crossing a dirt field on the way back to the Metro stop, Mother Russia asks Pravdin if he thinks she should let her name be used in an ad in the United States of America by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Pravdin, absorbed in his own thoughts, nods vaguely. “Who will be hurt?’ ’he says.

“You really didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

Pravdin nods again. He is watching Nadezhda, who has wandered off, is adjusting her telephoto lens, taking a series of pictures of a peasant woman sitting on the back step of a dilapidated apartment house picking with thick fingers through a child’s hair for lice. Pravdin finds a pointed stone, scrawls in the earth:

Either the louse will defeat Socialism
or Socialism will conquer the louse

(V. Lenin: Pravdin has never been sure whose side he was on).

As Pravdin is about to descend into the subway, Mother Russia asks: “What about the ad for Singer?”

Pravdin, looking over her shoulder, spots a short man in a blue raincoat bending over in the dirt field and copying something into a notebook. “What ad?” he asks, preoccupied.

Pravdin gets off the train ahead of Mother Russia and Nadezhda, lingers for a time near the tomb of the unknown soldier trying (without success) to sell Bolshoi tickets to visiting Mongolians, makes his way at noon (bells sound the hours—but miss by one) to the Hotel Minsk for a buffet luncheon for comedians.

“Is Pravdin the name under which you perform?” inquires a young woman with too much lipstick and not enough eye shadow.

“That’s one way of phrasing it,” acknowledges Pravdin.

The young woman moistens her lips, scans the invitation
list, finds a “Prastin” and a “Protenkin” with nothing sandwiched between them. She looks up, takes in his sneakers, his trousers frayed at the cuffs, his Eisenhower jacket, his day-old growth of rust-colored beard, his red hair going off in all directions. “You don’t look humorous,” she concludes.

“Humorous is what I am,” insists Pravdin. He folds himself into a comic crouch, winds himself up as if he is a Don Quixote doll, starts his spiel. “Picture it: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill at Yalta. Roosevelt takes out a solid silver cigarette case, casually shows the inscription to the others. ‘To F.D.R., from a grateful American people,’ is what it says. Churchill, not to outdone, produces a platinum cigar case studded with semiprecious stones, casually shows the inscription to the others. ‘To the Right Honourable Winston Churchill, from a grateful British people,’ is what it says. Stalin comes up with a spun-gold tobacco pouch studded with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, casually shows the inscription to the others. It says, “To Count Esterhazy, from the Vienna Yacht Club!’ “

Pravdin freezes expectantly, but the young woman with too much lipstick and not enough eye shadow doesn’t crack a smile.

“Not funny,” she says.

“
Waak, waak
, not meant to be,” retorts Pravdin. “How about this one. Khrushchev delivers his speech to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin, then takes his seat. The vanguard of the proletariat responds with stunned silence. A note is passed up to the podium and handed to Khrushchev. ‘Where were you when all this happened?’ is what it says. Khrushchev turns purple with rage, charges like a bull back to the microphone, waves the note furiously over his head. ‘Who wrote this?’ he demands. Nobody moves a muscle. ‘That’s where I was,’ Khrushchev explains.”

Pravdin freezes again but the young woman remains stony faced. “Still not funny,” she says.

“
Waak, waak
, still not meant to be,” Pravdin replies, backtracking with a lopsided jig toward the street door.

Pravdin’s stomach rumbles; he queues at a sidewalk stand, makes do with a stale
piroshki
and a warm glass of
kvass
. Picking at the pieces of
piroshki
stuck between his teeth with the nail of his little finger, he walks over to the pink prewar building in which the All-Russian Feminine Beauty Standards Bureau has its offices.

When his turn comes, Pravdin pulls from the bowels of his briefcase what appears to be a tube of cream.

“Someone’s already invented toothpaste,” says the tired functionary who nicked himself shaving and coagulated the blood with bits of toilet paper he forgot to remove.