Mother Russia (21 page)

“Where is the crime?” Pravdin demanded the first time they went over the ground, “disseminating falsehoods that happen by coincidence to be derogatory to the system, or derogating the system with information that happens by coincidence to be false?”

“You don’t understand,” Melor explained patiently. “If it is false, it follows that it is derogatory.”

“What about disseminating truehoods that also happen to be derogatory?” Pravdin probed for weak spots in Melor’s logic. There were none.

“Something that is true cannot at the same time be derogatory.”

“Ha!” retorted Pravdin, “I have you. That Frolov is a plagiarist is a truehood. That powerful bosses protect him from the consequences of this truehood is derogatory to the system.”

“Because you say Frolov is a plagiarist doesn’t make him a plagiarist,” Melor countered.

“Proof is what I have,” Pravdin muttered, tiring of the game.

“Produce it,” challenged Melor, and he added: “I’m
talking about originals, not photocopies, it goes without saying.”

“Without saying,” Pravdin agreed, “is how it goes.”

The minute hand on the counterclockwise clock makes its noisy way from eleven to ten to nine. Pravdin continues back in time, relives the trip in the ambulance to the KGB complex, the straitjacketing on the cobblestones of Red Square, the slap at the Bolshoi, the speech to the eerily quiet Writers’ Congress, the interview with the Poet, the appointment with the prosecutor, Nadezhda’s birthday party, and so forth and so on. He winds up, half asleep, squinting into the sulfurish light that remains lit all the time, scavenging for odds and ends in the snow after his release from the camps. He is pinning on the four medals when the door to his room opens and Half-Again Dimitri, the largest of his three warders, enters with a tray, which he deposits on the edge of the only piece of furniture in the room, the bed.

Pravdin squirms into a sitting position. “In is where I can’t hold it any longer,” he begs Half-Again Dimitri. “A permit for daytime peeing is what I have.”

The warder plays with the lobe of a cauliflower ear, looks at his watch, shakes his wrist to get it going again. “It’s supposed to be self-winding,” he says to himself.

“Self-winding is what we’re all supposed to be,” Pravdin moans, clutches his crotch in agony.

“I suppose it will be all right,” Half-Again Dimitri says, and he indicates with a toss of his head that Pravdin is permitted to follow him. Half-Again Dimitri steps into the long white corridor, taps on the metal door three times with a large key. At the far end of the corridor another guard taps back three times, the signal that no “clients” (as the guards call the inmates) are coming or going; in this wing it will go badly for the warders if clients so much as catch sight of one another. Pravdin, toilet trained, slips his feet into his laceless
basketball sneakers, grips his pajamas by the waist to keep them from falling around his ankles (“No laces includes no belts,” the guardian instructed him when he arrived—only God knows how long ago!), follows Half-Again Dimitri down the corridor, hugging the wall opposite the clocks, all of which are running—but at varying speeds, and in different directions. (At the check-in, Pravdin stole a look at the date, figured out that the place was being run on the Julian calendar, thirteen days behind the Gregorian twentieth century.) The W.C. is the only one Pravdin has ever seen without graffiti over the urinal. His bladder bursting, he closes his eyes, luxuriates in the act of peeing, imagines he is writing with urine in the snow:

Violence is the opiate of the people

(G. Mendeleyev: Pravdin wonders if anyone will see the penis-writing in the snow), shuffles back to his room to attack the meal that Half-Again Dimitri has deposited on the bed.

Nothing is what works out the way you expect
, Pravdin consoles himself. Campwise from his twelve years on location, he assumed he would learn the ropes in a matter of days, install himself in some advantageous position (straitjacket custodian maybe, or trustee in charge of night peeing), institute the official exchange rate (four fistfuls of bread equal to one bowl of soup equal to eight grams of tobacco equal to enough cloth to wind three times around an average foot), settle into a routine that would have as its ultimate goal the painless passing of time. But how can time pass painlessly when he is no longer sure in what direction it is moving? And at what rate?

Everything conceivable has been done to disorient the clients. There are no windows in the building through which light, or night, can pass, or at least Pravdin has never come across any in his escorted wanderings around the corridor to the W.C., to the (daily? semiweekly? who can say?) therapy
sessions, once to the infirmary for an enema lovingly administered by a male nurse with sour breath. It is impossible to keep track of the time of day from the dozens of electric clocks, because each one has a different story to tell. The meals are no tip-off either: after what Pravdin takes to be a sleepless night, Half-Again Dimitri will turn up with a lunch, followed a couple of hours later by a breakfast, followed eighteen hours later by a second breakfast. It is enough to drive a man off his rocker.

For a while Pravdin thought he had figured out a way to beat the system. It worked this way: Pravdin, as far back as he could remember, always emptied his bowels around nine in the morning. Now a trained sphincter muscle, he reasoned, couldn’t be thrown off by the absence of windows, or clocks that ran counterclockwise, or random meals. For what Pravdin took to be two weeks, his sphincter worked like a clock. But someone must have figured out his system, because the next thing he knew he was forced to drink some bitter liquid that constipated him for what he took to be several days (or weeks; who can say?), a state of affairs that ended with the loving enema from the male nurse with sour breath.

Pravdin’s last resort was his beard. From God knows what obscure reach of his jackpot mentality he summoned up the fact that beards grow more quickly during the night, so he spent endless hours (or an entire day; who can say?) fingering the stubble on his chin what he took to be every few minutes. He must have been spotted through the observation panel, because Half-Again Dimitri stopped turning up with an electric razor to shave Pravdin. His rust-colored beard is long enough now so that he can just catch sight of the tip if he strains his eyes in the bottoms of their sockets.

It goes without saying that there are no mirrors. No mirrors includes no unpainted metal surfaces, no place where
enough water can collect to give back a reflection. (Even the toilet bowl is dry.) Well, reflections he can do without, but the thing that makes Pravdin’s skin crawl is the total absence of wood. No wood means no reassuring incantations about being reasonably healthy, relatively sane and a resident in the last wooden house in central Moscow.

“How are you getting on?” inquires the interrogator, whose name is Doctor Berezin, when Pravdin is brought to his office for another therapy session. “Anything you’d like to complain about?”

Clutching his pajamas, Pravdin puts on a bold front. “Other than no water in the toilet bowl, no regular bowel movements, no shaving, no windows, no wood, no conversations with other clients, no regular meals, no idea what time of day it is, what day of the week it is, what week of the month it is, what month of the year it is, there’s nothing particular I’d complain about, no,” Pravdin says. But he can’t sustain it. Coiling into a comic crouch, he whines: “My right arm is what I’d give for a line on diurnal tides in the Philippine Sea.”

“Very revealing,” comments Doctor Berezin, a heavy-lidded latent intellectual whose eye movements lag a fraction of a second behind his head movements, so that the act of looking is made to seem like an afterthought. He wears a white laboratory coat with a plastic flower in the buttonhole and tobacco stains on the lapels.

“Not meant to be,” mutters Pravdin, taking his usual place on the plastic seat in front of the plastic desk.

Doctor Berezin studies for a long time his handwritten notes in Pravdin’s dossier.

“We left off”—the doctor’s head, then his eyes, come up from the dossier—“with my suggestion that your attempts to slander Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov were
motivated in part by your unconscious desire to win the respect of Nadezhda Oos, with whom you are in love. Have you had a chance to think more about this?”

“Thinking is what I don’t do much of,” Pravdin explains with a cackle. “I spend most of my time trying to calculate what time it is. If you would tell me, other things are what I could occupy myself with.”

“Think about it now,” the doctor instructs Pravdin. “What do you see as your motive?”

“About why I was doing what I was doing, I never thought much,” Pravdin insists. “Frolov is a fake. I assumed all I had to do was show the right person the evidence and that would be the end of him.”

“Don’t you see that you are obsessed with changing the system?” Doctor Berezin says, and he adds: “Your type always thinks you will change things. You will have the impact of a footprint on water.”

Pravdin shakes his head gloomily. “Beating the system is what Fm obsessed with, not changing it.”

“I suggest that your obsession has at its roots the twelve years you spent in the camps during the period of the cult of the personality.” Doctor Berezin massages his lips with the eraser at the end of his plastic pencil. “I suggest that you harbor paranoid delusions about reforming society. But have you ever stopped to consider that a completely fair society, in which no citizen could blame circumstances beyond his control for his failures, would be a disaster? The idea astonishes you, I see. Yes, a disaster. Instead of being able to shrug off failures as the inevitable result of social unfairness, we would have to attribute them to our own shortcomings. Resentments would build up and eventually rip apart the social fabric. Don’t you see that a certain amount of arbitrary unfairness is essential to any advanced industrial society?”

“I can’t shrug off failures because I can’t shrug,” Pravdin says moodily.

Doctor Berezin is annoyed by the response. “Is that all you have to say?” he demands sharply.

Pravdin presses his palms over his ears. “I have invented a new genre,” he groans, “the genre of silence.”

The doctor is impressed with the phrase, copies it into the dossier. “Who said that?” he asks, looking up with his head, then with his eyes.

“I said that,” Pravdin retorts.

Pravdin, back in his room, finds a breakfast tray waiting for him on the edge of his bed. He passes up the cold toast, drinks the lukewarm tea from the plastic cup. His palm slaps against his high forehead:
Plastic cup Why didn’t I think of that?
He casually turns his back on the observation panel in the door, snaps off the plastic handle, grinds down the scar by rubbing it against the stone wall. After a while Half-Again Dimitri removes the tray without comment. Pravdin, his spirits soaring, fingers his treasure. He sits on the floor and begins to tap on the wall, using an old Siberian prison code that substitutes numbers for letters.

“Hello to anyone,” he taps quietly on the wall.

There is no response.

“Hello to anyone,” he taps more urgently.

There is a faint tapping from the other side. Pravdin counts quickly, decodes hungrily this first contact with another client. “What time is it?” is what the neighbor wants to know.

“No idea,” Pravdin taps back. “How long you been in?”

Before the answer arrives Half-Again Dimitri appears at the door, signals with his key to make sure the corridor is free of clients, leads Pravdin back to the interrogator.

“We left off,” Doctor Berezin murmurs soothingly, “with you claiming you had invented a new genre, the”—he consults his notes—“genre of silence is what you called it.”

“That was just a few minutes ago,” exclaims Pravdin in agitation.

The doctor is surprised. “That was yesterday,” he coldly corrects him.

“Oy,” Pravdin buries his head in his hands. “I could have sworn it was a few minutes ago.”

“Why do you cringe like that?” asks the doctor. “Are you afraid of me?”

“I must be,” Pravdin answers. “Otherwise why am I making such an effort to like you.”

“I’m not sure I follow?”

“Against people we’re afraid of,” explains Pravdin, “our only defense is to like them so that they will like you back for liking them. In the camps every prisoner knew that it was the first sign of giving in to fear when he began to like his jailers. I must be afraid of Half-Again Dimitri too, because yesterday (or was it last week; who can say?) I found myself thinking he had a sympathetic face.”

“There is no reason why you shouldn’t like me,” Doctor Berezin offers. “I am, after all, on your side, though it may be difficult for you to see this clearly right now. The official who is dealing with your case considers that you are guilty of ideological sabotage, but I am of the opinion that your actions are a symptom of a curable mental condition.”

“You’re off your rocker,” Pravdin says, “if you think I’m off my rocker.”

Doctor Berezin is not offended. “Only a trained psychiatrist can detect mental illness in its formative stages. Most of our clients are unaware of their condition. Even members of their families, or close friends, don’t notice anything, or misinterpret what they do notice. At first everyone protests,
out afterwards many of our clients and their relatives come back to the hospital to thank us.” The doctor smiles. “Perhaps you will return to thank us too one day.”

Doctor Berezin pushes a plastic button on his desk. Almost immediately Half-Again Dimitri turns up at the door to escort Pravdin back to his cell, where he finds another breakfast waiting for him on his bed. “Breakfast I just ate,” whines Pravdin.

“That was yesterday,” says Half-Again Dimitri.

As soon as he is alone Pravdin taps on his neighbor’s wall with his treasured bit of plastic. “How long ago did I leave off tapping?” he asks.

“An hour,” the answer comes back, “or maybe a day. Who can say?”

“How long you been in?” Pravdin repeats his question.