PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (21 page)

Viktor arrived on Tuesday afternoon, his face set in a rictus of grim deliberation. He too had traversed a difficult weekend. His suit was wrinkled and his tie undone. His stare was glassy. I recalled that his wife had left him and, I swear, I had a premonition. I motioned him toward the divan, but he ignored the invitation to make pleasantries. Stooping awkwardly, he opened his briefcase, removed the original copy of the petition and slid it across the desk.

I saw at once that I had been snookered. No more than a half-dozen signatures filled the left-hand side of the petition below Viktor’s. Viktor had said the week before that Misha Vishnevsky had many friends in high places, and not only in the union. Misha, Viktor said, was genuinely liked and politically well connected. In any case, even among those who didn’t know him, there was widespread revulsion at the tactics of the security organs and a commitment not to allow the gains of the past few years to be reversed. Yet most of the names on the list were unfamiliar and those that weren’t belonged to individuals of exceedingly modest reputation. Not one of my colleagues in the Secretariat was represented.

“It’s early in the week,” Viktor muttered, by way of explanation.

“Monday’s early in the week. Tuesday’s already the beginning of the middle of the week.”

“No one’s been in their office.”

“But you’ve received commitments?”

He nodded his head in assent.

“From who?”

“I’d rather not say, not until they’ve actually signed. You know how it is.”

I did. I made a falsely hearty mental shrug and signed the petition with an extravagant flourish, plunging my name’s descenders to the floor of the next space.

When Viktor sighed I realized that he had been holding his breath. “So, Rem,” he said. “That’s done.” He gingerly returned the document to his briefcase.

“We should talk sometime, Viktor.”

He nodded his head again, meaning: not here. Too many ghosts stalked the corridors of this building, a neoclassical mansion that had been built in the nineteenth century for a count named Sollogub. The yellow house, trimmed in white and flanked by two symmetrical wings, was said to have later served Tolstoy as a model for his depiction of the Rostov mansion in
War and Peace.
Many of us, unconsciously indulging the conceit that fiction trumped fact, would insist that it was indeed the Rostov mansion.

“Thank you.”

Viktor clasped my hand, and I was surprised by its strength and warmth. Then he left. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

Now I realized that the weight pressing on my soul the entire weekend was not the fear of signing the petition, but the fear that I would not. With the door closed, I seemed about to levitate from my desk. Or, conversely, I was in the tumble of some glorious fall, the wind sweeping my precociously graying, sloppily long hair
behind me. All at once I recalled the sensations—so vivid they were nearly physical—that I had experienced when my first poem had been accepted for publication. Then too there had been relief: I would be a writer after all. Then too there had been a wonderment at my trespass: in that case, across the holy fields of Russian literature. And then there had been the prolonged, deliciously drowsy wait for the journal’s actual publication and arrival. (None of the pleasures of publication approach the pleasure of anticipating publication.)

Still buoyed by relief, I turned to the mail that had accumulated on my desk in the previous few days. There was some union business—applications for membership and information about a forthcoming musical program dedicated to a visiting Malaysian playwright—as well as a personal letter from a family friend and a large gray envelope that contained, I knew at a glance, a manuscript from some provincial literary aspirant. I received envelopes of this kind not infrequently and considered the thoughtful reading of their contents an obligation incurred by my profession as well as by my office. My own literary career had begun with a similar packet addressed to Boris Sorokin. I cut open the large envelope and shook out onto the desk a spill of onion skin.

The cover letter contained a few comments about my most recent novel that were perceptive in their artfully offhanded approval. I brought the paper to my face, but the only perfume was the ink’s. Sometimes ambitious female writers sent their photographs; Marina Burchatkina hadn’t, so I assumed that she was plain. I wasn’t disappointed. Already the caress of her praise had produced
the accustomed tingling along the insides of my thighs, a quickening of my appetite. If she were plain, I could at least be assured that my response to her work would be based on its merit.

Her letter stated that she was a schoolteacher in Kaluga and had contributed a number of items to a vaguely familiar provincial youth magazine. She asked if perhaps, “respected comrade,” I would advise her, on the basis of these stories and poems, whether she should continue her literary pursuits.

I returned the manuscript to the envelope, which I slid into a drawer for later reading, but curiosity prevented me from releasing my grip on it. I pulled out the manuscript. Never did I open an envelope from a novice writer without the trembling hope that it contained something wonderful, something that would change my life or the course of Russian literature. I had yet to be rewarded for this expectation, which I sustained for its evidence of my idealism and open-mindedness. Even today, I pick through the most obscure and irregularly published journals looking for a miracle.

A minute swept away that morning’s millennial hopes. Marina had sent me three short stories and a sheaf of poetry, forgettable even now after all that’s happened. I remember only my response: a headshake and a dull, leaden feeling. Her work was not as poor as other
samotyok
that had “self-flowed” onto my desk. She had a competent command of the language, but it was put to use for nothing original and certainly nothing urgent. Mired deep within the then loosely watched borders of conventional
socialist realism, the stories were predictable and unpersuasive. Some of the poems simply failed to scan.

Fortunately for Marina, enough of my good mood remained to compose a few words of mild encouragement. I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. I told her that I appreciated her comments about my novel and was touched by her decision to turn to me for advice. I commended her careful use of language and her obviously heartfelt sentiments. All true. And then I advised her as I would have advised the most inarticulate and illiterate of aspirants and what I advised myself when my own work faltered: keep writing.

Of course, it was not only ghosts that stalked the halls of Vorovskovo, 52. There were corporeal informers and professional eavesdroppers or, to put it more benignly, people whom we would simply prefer not have auditing our conversations. Viktor’s nod had reminded me, as I needed to be reminded from time to time, that the union was an instrument of the state. It was closely monitored by several organs of the state, including the Committee for State Security—that is, the KGB—and the Party. Indeed, several high-ranking members of the Secretariat passing through the narrow hallways also held rank in the KGB, and others owed their official positions to inclusion on the Party’s or the KGB’s
nomenklatura
lists. This infiltration was ubiquitous throughout Soviet society. As if placed in a room with two bright lamps, each organization or
government agency cast a pair of shadows; one belonged to the Party and the other to the security forces.

On the Rostov mansion’s polished parquet floors, there were many places where the penumbras of these shadows overlapped. Various union secretaries, section secretaries, deputies, and other officials openly served more than one master. Many of them did it with a grace that lent them authority and propriety. Boris Sorokin was a fixture at Party congresses, where he lectured the delegates on the importance of providing the resources to maintain high literary output. Kind, garrulous Viktor Ilyin, the Moscow branch’s organizational secretary, was a former lieutenant general in the KGB, with whom he kept close ties. It was presumed that even Darya Sergeyevna, the stout old lady who had been watching our coats since Gorky’s time, castigating us for being underdressed and prescribing home remedies when, as a consequence of our defiance, we became ill, kept a tally of our comings and goings, and especially who with.

The shadows overlapped across our desks. The rank and file never forgot that a full literary career outside the union was impossible: nonunion writers without registered employment risked prosecution as “social parasites.” All of us knew our responsibilities as Soviet writers. We had private and public selves. Writing was the work of the public self.

 

The year-long repairs of the café downstairs ended with it unpainted. The café reopened anyway and after the first weekend a number of comic and obscene graffiti
marked the walls. They were brought to the attention of Konstantin Fedin, the union’s first secretary, who furiously swore he would catch and punish the perpetrators. Before that could happen, some anonymous hero painted over the evidence with a copse of graceful palm trees. Afterwards it was allowed that other writers could add to the landscape “in a tasteful way,” and soon the walls were covered with more palm trees, Gaugin-esque girls in straw skirts, dragons, flying fish, and gentle, hilarious caricatures of our most easily caricatured colleagues. More than one observer commented that we made better artists than writers, a remark that seemed less amusing when Valery Schenëv mordantly responded, “Yes, that is fair, since the members of the artists’ union are better writers.” Indeed, the artists’ union, much more political than the writers’ union, was currently consuming itself with petitions and tracts.

I laid a brush to the middle of the wall closest to the kitchen and when I pulled it away there remained the image of a naked, round-faced woman, angelic in her demeanor, her torso almost entirely obscured by tomatoes, green pepper plants, vines, and a tottering stack of books. At the woman’s shoulder, incompetently foreshortened so that it appeared to be resting on it, was balanced a small, uneven wooden house, our dacha. I suffered a number of comments about being either so sentimental or so guilty that I would paint my own wife.

I don’t make any claims for the painting’s artistic merit, but I liked it anyway, for its lushness, for its appetizing, perfectly round tomatoes, and for my wife. The
painting was indeed sentimental: the one or two square meters that it occupied was a map of idealization. I’m told it remains on the café wall to this day.

My wife Lydia was from the country, a small town in central Russia, and never seemed to forgive the circumstances (admission to the philology department of Moscow State University) that had brought her to Moscow. She hated the motor traffic, she hated the noise, and most of all she hated the food, the dearth of fresh vegetables and fruit even in summer and their tinned replacements all year round, the factory chickens, the pale, tasteless cellulose-stuffed bread and the fatty, rancid meat. She called it food for slaves. She had hardly less disdain for the union food packages, containing otherwise impossible-to-get delicacies, that I brought home from Yeliseyev’s Gastronom. Shortly after we married she established a garden on our fifth-floor balcony. The balcony was almost always in shade and hardly anything grew there save her resentment. I could watch her from a window in my study as she crouched at the root of a sickly vine, tapping the soil, muttering incantations. Then she would shake her head, give the root a parting touch, and go back to her book.

Lydia’s passion for reading, her wanton surrender to an author, was the sexiest thing about her. Embracing a book, she was completely vulnerable to the author’s advances. She would accept any indignity, swallow any lie, and remain constant in the face of the author’s infidelities and depravities. Regardless of the wattage of the light above her head, she gave the text the firm grip of her attention. She was always missing her metro station, even
when she read standing, wedged between the other passengers. Sometimes the text was my own. In the hours when I knew she was reading my work, I lived a kind of distracted half-life, as I imagined the play of my words against her retinae.

One evening earlier that summer, like a gladiator approaching the tribune with booty, I had swaggered into our flat and announced that we had been given the right to rent a small union dacha in Peredelkino, the writers’ settlement just outside Moscow. I had expected to be tattooed with kisses, but Lydia was too surprised to even congratulate me. As she stood in the kitchen, tears welling in her eyes, I realized that I hadn’t fully gauged the weight of despair that she had accumulated living here in the city.

Even though the hour was late and the juices of a roast were bubbling in the oven, she demanded that we inspect the property right away. By
elektrichka
from the Kiev Station the village was a half hour’s journey. In that time she hardly spoke, as if fearing to break the spell. The house was located about two kilometers from the train stop, a distance we covered nearly on a run. We arrived during the prolonged twilight, the shadows long and diffuse, the birds childishly atwitter about their late bedtimes.

The dacha was small, but it was a dacha nonetheless, a wooden, two-room house sitting on a small plot of land and encroached by vines and juniper bushes. The overgrowth made it impossible to see our neighbors, even though they were less than twenty meters away on either side of us. An outdoor dinner party unwound somewhere and a woman’s laugh was close enough to
promise that I might someday know it intimately. Our dacha possessed neither indoor plumbing nor telephone, but it had a stove and was comfortably laid out and clean. From the porch I watched Lydia till some soil with her foot, testing it.

“No chickens,” I declared.

She turned and gazed at me as if I were mad, the mad tsar issuing an ukase to his tenth-of-an-hectare kingdom.