PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (23 page)

“No, I thank
you.
Very subtle piece of criticism, but it’ll be understood in the right places.”

It took me a few moments to figure out what he was talking about. The article had been a general appraisal of current Georgian cinema, based on a week’s gloriously bacchanalian stay in Tbilisi. Then I recalled that my review had in passing praised the film
My Father’s Orchard,
which was loosely based on some stories by Elgudzhi Piranishvili. Piranishvili had written a bruising attack on the critic Mustai Suleimenov in
Novy Mir
just a few months earlier. This had come, allowing for publication delays, immediately after Suleimenov had blistered Fazil Iskander, who was frequently published in Anton’s journal. Sides were being taken. I had somehow blundered into a literary intrigue that, given the number of Caucasians involved, would probably send my greatgrandchildren into hiding sometime in the next century. I looked for a way to ease out of the conversation.

“Here’s some poems,” I said, pushing the manuscript across the desk. “Tell me what you think of them.”

“Marina Burchatkina. Who is she?”

“Some lady in Kaluga. She writes prose too, stories.”

The quality of his smile changed, showing his nearly radioactive white teeth. The smile was both predatory and congratulatory. At the same time, the image of the poet in her nightclothes penetrated my imagination. The flirtation hit home.

“I’ve never met her,” I said at once. “She just sent this to me. If you don’t care for it, fine. You can dispose of it.”

From that winter (or was it another?) I remember great gusts of wind spraying loose snow up Moscow’s icy streets, blowing off hats and freezing the trolley tracks and tram lines. Through the twilight weeks and months of sub-zero temperature, Lydia remained at the dacha, reading under a sixty-watt bulb by the stove, eating macaroni and the vegetables and fruit she had conserved, plus whatever I managed to bring in from the city. Because of the weather and various commitments, some of which were frankly unburdensome, I couldn’t make the journey to Peredelkino every weekend, but she didn’t seem to mind my absence or in any way suffer her solitude. She made the acquaintance of her neighbors, mostly the straw-whiskered parents of our literary lions, so she wasn’t entirely alone. She raised her head from her books from time to time, I surmised, and gazed through the frosted window pane at the babushkas as they
trudged in felt boots through the snow, pulling their groceries and firewood on sleds. When I arrived at the dacha, Lydia and I would mostly talk about what we had been reading. She had no interest in gossip from the city, not even when it involved authors whose work she knew intimately. She hardly showed more interest in my occasional and grossly minimized confessions of marital misconduct, except to the extent that it distracted me from my work.

In the afternoons she led me on walks along the village’s icy, rutted streets, and then into the woods on skis, though we rarely got very far before she stopped to investigate some tree stump or burrow. She marveled at the signs of life submerged within the brittle, unmoving landscape: moss on the underside of a rock, a rodent’s tracks, a deer’s scat, a momentary rustling in the underbrush. The burrows were her favorite sites of investigation. She learned to recognize which animal sheltered within each hole and, more interestingly for her, how recently it had emerged to forage. There were two sides to the woods and it was the unseen one, in wary repose, that carried on life from one year to the next. A creek was interrupted by a sloppy, half meter’s fall, at the bottom of which was a pool cloudy with tiny iridescent fish. Lydia gazed into the super-cooled water while I stamped my skis for warmth and made grunting sounds in favor of moving on.

It occurred to me that Lydia might have taken a lover here in Peredelkino, an eventuality that I did not welcome but had in any event prepared myself for. Turnabout was fair play and all that, especially after Tbilisi.
On my return trips to Moscow, I tallied the likely candidates among the village’s permanent residents, the ones into whose arms she might that very moment be flinging herself after a weekend’s forced separation, and concluded with a very short list. In winter the village was populated by few men of an appropriate age or suitable social background.

I resolved to keep an eye on these three or four hypothetical swains, but the more I dwelled upon them, the less likely the liaisons seemed. There were much younger girls available, and Lydia had never been a flirt, and these guys worked too hard anyway, which is why they lived year round in the village. But rather than take comfort in the deduced proof of her constancy, I became increasingly worried for her. My wife’s emotional life was contracting. How could she not be lonely? Was literature and nature sustenance enough?

There had been a time, even before I set out as a writer, when I had believed that it was. As a schoolboy, I had daydreamed of Alpine monasteries and tropical islands provided with nothing but great books. This fantasy was the strongest and most maddening when I was in the army, serving out my conscription in the Turkmen desert and surrounded by men of such low intelligence and negligible curiosity that they were barely more than machines for eating and shitting. After using a month’s salary to ransom a secondhand edition of
In Search of Lost Time
from the depredations of an Ashkhabad bookshop, I conspired to obtain two weeks of duty in a remote, vacant guardhouse. The job required nothing but my presence. I had already inspected the building: The
unpainted room I would inhabit was clean, warm, and well lit. There was a bed and a desk.

By the second day, by the time Marcel had witnessed the duchess in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad, I was defeated, unable to turn another page. The guardhouse’s low concrete ceiling hardly allowed me room to breathe, and I was tortured by a single fly orbiting a bare lightbulb on the other side of the room. Nor could I bear another lap around the muddy meadow outside the guardhouse. I was beset with doubts about my character and identity. To my piercing horror, I now believed that I didn’t care to read after all. My literary enthusiasm was no more than an affectation, common to “sensitive” adolescents. The brutes in my company were my real friends, my real brothers. The remainder of the two weeks before I was returned to them seemed as vast as the desert itself. I discovered in myself an enormous capacity for sleep and masturbation.

I eventually returned to Proust, of course, not in a quiet season, but rather in a year of loss and upheaval, when I changed flats and jobs in quick succession and when the connections between one day and the next seemed as tenuous as the skin on the surface of a bowl of pudding. Although my daily ration of reading was limited to a few labyrinthine paragraphs at bedtime, consumed in rough living quarters amid unfriendly strangers, the events in Combray and Faubourg St. Germain never lost their narrative continuity. My conquest of the novel set a pattern for my reading throughout my adult life, all of which seemed to have been caught on the fly.

Although I regretted my chaotic reading and writing
habits, I could never be satisfied with the life of the monkish intellectual. I needed the glitter of society and the refreshment of action. Yet at parties, surrounded by noise and dispute, I would be seized by the desire to return home at once, either to my typewriter or to that evening’s book. One desire fed another. Consequently my favorite place to read was on the train, where the book trembled in my lap like a living thing and each page consumed another kilometer or two of track.

In similar regard, the union was the perfect place for me. I loved the unliterary busyness of it: the applications and other forms to be processed, the reports to be filed, and the many meetings to attend in chandeliered banquet rooms, all in the service of literature.

I read much and worked hard the first winter Lydia stayed at the dacha. It was also one of the most unsettling and gayest seasons of my life. Every night in Moscow there were sprawling, sloppy parties, often with marijuana, fisticuffs, foreign girls in miniskirts and vinyl boots, deadly serious political and literary arguments (I don’t remember any of them), and, over and over without end,
Rubber Soul.
Many of the foreign girls I brought back to my flat couldn’t read a word of Russian, but believed afterwards that they had become experts in contemporary Soviet literature.

And then spring arrived early, promising even more political freedom and travel. Friends went off to Paris and New York and came back agog. The gatherings moved out to Peredelkino, where they bloomed into lovely garden parties with even more foreigners. Lydia consented to attend these parties, chatting amiably with
the visitors in their own languages and, in the garden, inspecting with an appreciative, critical eye every flower and plant. She appeared to have come out of the winter without ill effect to her humor or warmth.

My memory of all the parties I attended in Peredelkino have merged into a single gathering, which continued for days and was crammed with
scandale.
For the purposes of this recollection, I have located the
über-
party in Sasha Nasedkin’s garden and peopled it with everyone I knew at the time, whether they were in Moscow then or not. The compact circle of chairs around the picnic table dreamily accommodates two hundred guests. Vasily Aksyonov tells a joke about Kosygin, Johnson, and de Gaulle in a leaky boat. Gavril Feldshteyn snaps down the hors d’oeuvres as if he hasn’t eaten in a week, which is very likely nearly true. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a dapper
bitnik
in a black turtleneck, strenuously flirts with two flushed starlets. Apart from the group, over by the lindens, Vadim Surkov speaks with Lydia. Hello? I screw up my eyes. Surkov spent the winter in Peredelkino, just a few doors from Lydia, but I decide that the conversation is too easygoing for them to be sleeping with each other.

Meanwhile, morose and inattentive, Viktor downs one glass of vodka after another. His conjuration at the party is a bit of a stretch, since he hardly ever went out. He had nearly dropped from sight, though occasionally one heard reports of him emerging from a rain-soaked alley or from the most obscure and remote research rooms of the Lenin Library, always alone. When we occasionally crossed paths, his conversation became guarded and his look furtive. I would sense that I had interrupted a
conversation that he was having with himself. At the section of the table where I have placed him, cozy between two women poets of advancing years, he has created a small disturbance, a tear in the social fabric, but the precise nature of his mutters remains beneath human hearing, which is lucky for him.

A train was canceled, I missed my connection, and so I spent the better part of a day in an intermediate station, happily reading Beckett in a glassed-in waiting room perfumed by fresh flowers. By the time I reached Mtsensk, it was late in the afternoon. I was supposed to be met there by a representative of the collective farm that had invited me to read at a “literary evening,” but no one was on the platform. I buttoned my jacket against the chill—in fact, it was a superb late-summer afternoon, the surrounding wheat fields incandescent—and stepped onto the gravel beside the station house. Parked there was a mud gray military vehicle covered in gray mud. A middle-aged man behind the wheel, his jaw slack and bristled white, stared directly ahead and took no notice of me.

“I’m Krilov.”

The man responded with an almost imperceptible shrug. I went to the other side of the vehicle, a small UAZ truck with a torn canvas top. The door squealed as I opened it. A fecal, alcoholic odor spilled out. I could see the vodka bottle, not quite empty, wedged between the driver’s seat and his door.

“Are you in any condition to drive?” I said.

He didn’t reply. In any case, I myself couldn’t drive. I climbed into the truck, taking care not to bump my head. He switched on the ignition and lurched us onto the road.

“How far?” I asked.

At last he spoke, in a sullen rasp. “Fifty-three.”

We drove along a pitted road so straight that its end shimmered and dissolved in the distant haze. I rolled open the window, hung my face out into the passing air, and closed my eyes. The warmth of the setting sun was like a caress.

I usually enjoyed these so-called creative trips to the provinces. For one thing, the per diem for expenses negotiated by the union was usually far in excess of the expenses incurred. Less tangibly, visits from the capital were celebrated as important events in the provincial villages and kolkhozes, which often provided the guests with tours, lavish banquets, and introductions to admiring readers. Writers never tire of readers who admire them. I should have made the journey the night before with the other writers who had been invited, including Schenëv and Basmanian, but I had been delayed by union business. Now I would be lucky to arrive by the start of the evening’s program.

I seemed to have left my luck in Moscow. A half hour across the featureless farmland, the driver abruptly pulled to the side of the road and shoved open his door, just catching the bottle as it fell. It was an agile gesture, probably well practiced. He followed it by heaving the contents of his guts onto the gravel. I looked away, but after he slammed shut the door, I became aware that he was wiping his mouth with his sleeve. The stink deepened.

He shifted into gear. As he gunned the engine, the truck jerked forward and fell back. Its engine stalled. I looked down at the wheels. They were mired in the soft, oily mud alongside the road. The driver didn’t seem surprised. He put the gearshift back into neutral, stepped from the machine, and began shoving it from the rear. His grunts were arrhythmic and short winded. The truck rocked but remained in place.

I could have put my own shoulder to the back of the UAZ while he worked the gears. But he didn’t ask for help and I would have refused him if he had. He groaned and the truck rocked again.