Mother Russia (22 page)

“Months I think, but it may be a year, I’m not sure. How about you?”

“Two weeks is how long I was here according to my sphincter muscle,” Pravdin taps quietly, “but they constipated me and then gave me an enema. Now I only shit water so I don’t know how long ago the two weeks ended.”

“What are you in for?” Pravdin’s companion wants to know.

“Gate-crashing,” he taps back. “How about you?”

“I climbed out on a limb,” the neighbor replies, “for a crazy man who came to me with a story that Honored Artist Frolov is a plagiarist. I believed him and started to investigate the case.”

Pravdin
is
sick to his stomach. “Oy,” he moans, presssing his palms with their long lifelines over his ears. “More is what I don’t want to hear.”

Days (or weeks; who can say?) pass. Doctor Berezin keeps coming back, in the therapy sessions, to the question of motive.
“If we could dig deeply enough into your motivation,” he explains, “I think you would see the light of day and return the original manuscripts.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin comments tiredly; he has been kept up all night (or all day; who can say?) by the tapping on his wall, to which he didn’t have the heart to respond.

“Make an effort,” the doctor encourages him.

Pravdin, bored by the doctor’s persistence, decides to give him a dose of political bla-bla-bla. “What I was doing,” he says, “was testing whether there really is a difference between communism and capitalism, or whether they merely disagree over who owns the means of production, a relatively unimportant detail since what is important today is not who owns the means of production but who controls it.” Pravdin sees that Doctor Berezin is scribbling away in the dossier, waits patiently until the doctor’s head, then his eyes, come up. “As I understand it,” Pravdin goes on, “capitalism relies on the essential corruptibility of the individual; that is the foundation on which it is constructed. Communism, on the other hand, is based on the belief in the essential incorruptibility of the individual when confronted with the truth. So I confronted certain individuals with a certain truth.” When the doctor looks up again, Pravdin adds: “One poor silly bastard listened, the rest ran.”

“Let’s pass over motive for a while,” the doctor suggests, “in favor of more traditional avenues of investigation. Let’s talk about the animal that keeps turning up in your dreams, the one you are afraid to identify. Do you have an idea what it is?”

Pravdin shakes his head.

“A dog or a cat perhaps?” Doctor Berezin prompts. “A horse or a camel?”

Pravdin shakes his head again.

“What about the baby carriage? You remember”—the doctor checks the dossier—“eyeglasses shattered, the baby carriage hurtled down the steps, you were obsessed by who is in the carriage. In a subsequent dream you found out, but you refused to tell me. Perhaps you will confide in me now. Who was in the carriage?”

Pravdin studies the ceiling for a long while. “The animal I’m afraid to identify is who was in the carriage,” he says finally.

“Ah, now we’re getting someplace.” The doctor seems grateful for the information. A gleam comes into Pravdin’s eye as he watches him scribble excitedly in the dossier: if acting sane got him into this joint, then it follows that acting insane will get him out! His palm slaps his high forehead.
Why didn’t I think of this before: insanity is an idea whose time has come
. “Something else is what I should tell you,” Pravdin stage whispers, leaning forward eagerly. He rolls his eyes, mutters something about the walls having eyes, ears, a nose, a throat, sexual problems even, lowers his voice so that Doctor Berezin has to strain to hear him. “I come from the future. Ha! The idea astonishes you, I can see. Yes, yes, the future is where I come from. I’m working my way back through all my incarnations to my original incarnation.” Pravdin is on his feet now, leaning across the desk. “At each incarnation along the way, I try to disrupt events so that they create a future that doesn’t contain me, so I won’t exist to travel back in time.”

Doctor Berezin stares at Pravdin in a new light. “Why would you want to do that?” he inquires.

Pravdin practically climbs across the desk in excitement. “Because I’ve seen the future and it needs work,” he exclaims triumphantly. He clutches his temples to contain the hot flashes of panic. “I was
Homo Economicus
about the time of Cro-Magnon,” he says, flexing his primitively long thumb as if
it is irrefutable proof. Suddenly Pravdin leaps clear of the desk, grimaces crookedly, backpedals with a little jig toward the door. “Don’t you hear it?” he demands, cackling wildly, gasping for breath, “the music of the spheres is what it is: crazed Misses Marmeladeev and her troupe of children dancing to her frying pan drum on the Voznessensky Bridge. I hear it. Aiiiiiiiiiiii.”

A bearded Jew of indeterminate age leans against the sulfurish wall, his eyes sealed, his high forehead pressed to the imprint of a crucifix. Shots ring out, a ragged volley first, then a single shot from a smooth bored naval pistol. Pravdin starts, opens his eyes, sees for the first time the imprint of the crucifix. A horrified expression crawls across his face like a crab. At that instant a key turns in the lock, the door swings open with a squeal.

“Who is it?” he demands.

Who it is he’ll never know because he is startled by an insistent tapping on the wall—not the one on the public prosecutor’s side, but the opposite wall. Pravdin counts the taps, decodes. “Greetings,” is what the client on the other side is sending over and over.

Pravdin answers reluctantly. “I’m trying to sleep,” he taps out with the plastic handle of the cup.

“What are we here?” the client in the next room wants to know.

“Oy,” Pravdin moans, sick to his stomach again. He taps back: “What we are here is crazy.”

Half-Again Dimitri passes Pravdin his tray at the door. For days (or weeks, or months; who can say?) he hasn’t stepped inside because of the handwriting, in feces, on the wall. Directly facing the door, in large sculptured letters, Pravdin has written:

I’ve seen the future and it needs work

(L. Steffens: Pravdin weeps every time he reads it).

On the public prosecutor’s wall he has written:

Hustling will make you free.

On Friedemann T.’s side he has written, over his pillowless cot:

Mist, bell sounds and brokenness.

When Half-Again Dimitri returns to collect the tray, he collects Pravdin too. “Something out of the ordinary for you today,” he explains, signals with the key to make sure the corridor is client-free, leads Pravdin in a direction he has never been before, pausing at each twist in the hallway to get the all clear for the stretch ahead.

Beyond one right angle bend in the corridor they come across the sheet-draped body of a man lying on a rolling metal table. “I thought another client is whom I wasn’t allowed to see,” Pravdin comments sarcastically.

His sarcasm goes over Half-Again Dimitri’s head. “The regulations cover only live clients,” he says. He gestures with his large key toward the dead man. “Suicide. Cut his wrists with the plastic handle of a cup, which he sharpened on the wall.” Before Pravdin can protest, he whips off the sheet so that he can see the corpse.

Pravdin gasps, doubles over and throws up on his laceless sneakers. When he straightens again his lower jaw is twitching uncontrollably. He stares through moist eyes at the naked body of the young prosecutor: the skin appears to be drained of blood; white gauze has been wound tightly around his left wrist; lumps of sugar have been placed on his eyelids to keep them from opening.

“Dear God,” Pravdin moans, sways, starts to tap his head against the wall in sequences of three. Half-Again Dimitri restrains him from damaging state property (the wall? the head?). Pravdin rants softly. “We are the chosen people, as
evidence whereof we have cuffs on our trousers. I’m a big shot Old Testament prophet come to lead us in my beltless pajamas and laceless basketball sneakers to the land where you can pee without a permit.”

“Calm yourself,” Half-Again Dimitri implores.

“A windowless holy of holies is what we’re in,” cries Pravdin. White-jacketed guards come running from either end of the corridor. Pravdin squirms free of Half-Again Dimitri’s grip, sinks into a comic crouch that is totally devoid of humor, screams over and over:

“Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh, Yahweh.”

Pravdin is given an injection, calmed, carted off to a white amphitheater where he is strapped into a plastic swivel chair. He is blinded by spotlights that stab down at him from every side, squints into them, strains to catch some reaction from the audience: a shuffling of feet, gasps, coughs, anything. The diaphragms on the spotlights close. Overhead, lights buried in the ceiling glimmer dimly, brighten, flood the amphitheater. Pravdin, pale as death in the white light, is suddenly chilled to the marrow of his brittle bones; he thinks he sees in the half-circle of balconies that overlook the small stage familiar faces: the bulky lad with the sack of empties who scolded him for defacing a public notice; the one-eyed war veteran from the public prosecutor’s office; the policeman who caught him jaywalking; the expressionless lady at the housing agency who pocketed his Bolshoi tickets; the street vendor with the wind-up Don Quixotes; the tired man with thinning hair and his pregnant wife who were moving out of the flat in Dzerzhinsky; Zosima; Ophelia Long Legs; Porfiry Yakolev, the weatherman with the handlebar mustache; Master Embalmer Makusky, biting away on his cuticles; General Shuvkin, with his left sleeve neatly pinned back to the shoulder; the second prosecutor, who fractured his tibia
skiing in Zakopane; the Poet, deep in conversation with his housekeeper; A. N. Kulakova, the lady doctor who analyzed the Q-Tip; the thin bank manager who rejected the sperm bank; the man with the toupee who turned down the vaginal deodorant spray; the functionary with toilet paper coagulating his shaving nicks; the lady barber with the enormous breasts; the chambermaid who tried to run him down in the hall; also the beardless assistant rabbi; the blonde at the Bolshoi who accused him of spilling wine on her dress even.

Sedated, feeling as if he is walking on water vapor, Pravdin watches through a haze as Doctor Berezin outlines his case to the full house. “Antisocialist onanism,” he is saying, “was the first concrete indication of the patient’s essential alienation from the established order; a symptom, if you will, of the disassociation of his personality that was to become more profound as time went on. Scavenging in the snow shortly after his release from the camps, he came across four medals. According to his own account he immediately pinned them on and created a war-hero personality to go with them. From his earliest days he was attracted to fantastic schemes that had no roots in reality. In the camps, for instance, he spent two and a half years trying to produce a shoe from confiscated leather wristwatch straps. More recently he has pursued with paranoid preoccupation such diverse world-saving schemes as instant matzos and vaginal deodorant sprays.”

“And cotton toothpicks,” A. N. Kulakova shouts down from the balcony.

“Sperm banks too,” adds the thin bank manager.

“Don’t forget the slanderous attacks on Honored Artist of the Soviet Union Frolov,” calls the Poet’s housekeeper.

Pravdin concentrates on opening his eyes, or closing them, he’s not sure which.

“This disassociation from reality morbidly embedded in
his personality,” Doctor Berezin continues, “was really an early manifestation of incipient schizophrenia. The split in his personality can be clearly seen in the fact that he wore two wristwatches, one set to Greenwich Mean Time, the other to Moscow time, and both of which register diurnal tides in the Philippine Sea. Yes, diurnal tides! The idea astonishes you, I can see. But what could be more pertinent? Isn’t this the subconscious showing to the world its quintessential dualism, hence the
di
or
two?
It is as if the separate personalities of Pravdin are washed by separate tides.”

Suddenly Pravdin is drowned in a Greek-chorus of accusations:

“Obsessed with sex … three times in one night,” cries Porfiry Yakolev.

“Split personality … Robespierre Pravdin vs. Comrade Eisenhower,” shouts Ophelia Long Legs.

“Suffers from monomania … psychotic fixation on one world-saving scheme,” accuses the man with the toupee.

“Neglect of personal appearance … frayed cuffs … basketball sneakers … seldom shaves … general apathy … emotional insensitivity,” complains the chambermaid who tried to run him down.

“Hallucinations … delusions … convinced he alone has access to the truth … that he is being persecuted because of this,” declares the second prosecutor.

“Exaggerated sense of his own importance … thinks at various times he is a famous author … well-known physicist … professional comedian … master chess player,” calls the expressionless lady who pocketed his Bolshoi tickets.

“Incipient schizoheterodoxy … accompanied by paranoid delusions of reforming society,” asserts the Poet.

“Overestimation of his own personality … poor adaptation to the realities of the social environment … thinks he’s
an Old Testament prophet,” wails the beardless assistant rabbi.

“Uncontrollable emotions … bathetic … heightened nervousness whenever he deviates from the norm,” scolds the street vendor of wind-up Don Quixotes.

“Morbid fixation with death after life,” ventures Master Embalmer Makusky.

“Liar,” taunts General Shuvkin. “There were no campaigns.”

The one-eyed war veteran from the prosecutor’s office leans over the railing. “In my opinion,” he declares sadly, “he’s off his rocker!”

Pravdin buries his chin on his chest in shame. A pajama sleeve is rolled up; a needle punctures his skin. “Aiiiiiiiii,” he cries, sweaty and weak but not sure whether he is wide awake or sinking into the soft center of a nightmare.

A blind woman swabs with a Q-Tip the empty socket of an eye; a man whose fingers have been chewed down to the knuckles treats the cavity in the crotch of the Great Leader, the Living Light, with vaginal deodorant spray; a boy with a grotesquely long thumb reaches into a deep hole to feed matzos to dozens of wriggling vipers. Pravdin, drugged, drifting, clings to the broken images as if they were buoys, but the male nurse with the sour breath descends on his erection with chapped lips, draws it slowly into his mouth, strokes it with a tongue as roughly caressing as a cat’s. Pravdin lets the images slip through his fingers, moans, opens his swollen lids, cries out in agony when he realizes that it may not be a dream. With a panicky effort he tries to pull free, feels himself coming off—too soon, too soon. The male nurse accepts his flow, smirkingly sucks the last drops from him as Pravdin drifts off again into a region where images bob like buoys in
ink-black puddles covered with wrinkled, watery films of ice.