PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (27 page)

With that, the waves of machinery cast forth by the agate print of the metro schedule met at a point of destructive interference. The station emptied of trains. The noise subsided, despite the hundreds of travelers making their way to the platform exits. Marina and I heard each other laugh, nervously now. I was shocked by the words I had spoken, but even more so by what I believed were hers. We fell silent. Now that she could hear me, I wasn’t sure what I wished to say. I looked down the hall, the clock had passed the sixty second mark, but there was no sign of a train approaching on either track.

“Marina,” I said.

My voice was perfectly audible. Her smile was warm. Our eyes met as they had the night of our reading.

“Marina,” I repeated. Then I said, “Thank you for that review in
Znamya.”

She made a small, disappointed laugh and the air deflated from her.

“There’s no need to thank me. I write whatever I like.”

“Of course,” I said, stung by her rebuke. This did not stop me from adding: “And your novel. I liked that too.”

Another train finally arrived and we embraced in farewell. In my arms she assumed a substantiality that I had not expected, as if before I had only confronted the idea of Marina, and this was Marina herself. I began to tighten my embrace, but, no longer smiling, she abruptly brushed my cheeks with her lips, pulled away, and went
to the opposite end of the platform. I watched her go. As I returned to the staircase that had brought me here, a second train arrived. It was just then, before the train obscured it, that I looked up to read the name of the station emblazoned on the wall on the other side of the tracks: Beryevskaya, after Lavrenty Beria, the Georgianborn secret police chief executed in the weeks following Stalin’s death. At least, that’s what I thought I read.

I eventually found Ploshchad Revolutsii and hurried home, no longer in the mood to see my book clerk. Something had passed, I believed. I continued to run into Marina, of course, at parties and literary events, but less frequently, and the encounters carried less weight and possibility. Her novel won a few prizes and subsided from the public’s short-term memory. It was said that she was working on a second novel, but she showed it to no one. Despite taking occasional detours, and once even diagramming my recollection of the maze of tunnels, I never again succeeded in finding the metro station in which we had met.

Cowed by the criticism
The Northern Lights
had received, I put off work on my next novel. The skies grayed late in August, shortly after we picked the tomatoes. The crop was beautiful that year. Lydia and I ate them like apples, the juice running down our shirt fronts.

It wasn’t until November that Novel 4 began to emerge from the mists, but shortly afterwards I received a note that, in its powerful effect, prevented me from
doing any writing the rest of the day and unsettled me for several weeks to come. The union’s Foreign Commission, the letter duly informed me, was negotiating with an American publishing house for the rights to Marina’s first novel. I put the note down and stared at my desk for a while, infused with the childish hope that nothing would come of the negotiations.

My own discretion notwithstanding, the contents of the confidential memo became common gossip by the end of the day. I am sure that most of my colleagues initially reacted as I did, if for less complicated reasons. Publication abroad, especially in the West, was always a source of envy. Although the union and the government claimed three quarters of the royalties, and the remainder was transmuted into rubles and vouchers good at hard-currency stores, the balance was still a hefty amount of change. The foundation of many a dacha was composed of foreign royalty checks.

Moreover, translation, even if no further than into the obscure, tortured languages of the fraternal socialist countries, was a matter of great prestige. It made you an international writer, elevated you to panels discussing issues of great import, and won you a greater print run for your next book. Marina would be invited on the best domestic “creative trips”—such as the ones to the Baltics—and even garner foreign invitations. I expected that her novel would eventually be transformed into a film, a mysterious process that enhanced the author (even while it attenuated his work) and brought him even more piles of gold (or its voucher equivalents).

Once the negotiations were completed, several large
numbers were bruited about in the café, but I declined from using my union position to discover the size of Marina’s royalties. Shortly after the book was published in America, I attended a small party at Bulat Okudzhava’s, with Marina in attendance. Although the party around Okudzhava’s kitchen table was ostensibly in celebration of his birthday, Marina sat erect in her chair, flushed and bright eyed, as if the birthday honors belonged to her. She received our cheers and congratulations with regal grace.

None of us, however, saw the translation itself until the following year, when it was brought to Moscow by a middle-aged Canadian tourist unaware that our customs officials looked unkindly on the import of any books about Russia or by Russians, alive or dead, living abroad or at home, anti-Soviet or not, and would have preferred that visitors to our country not waste any of their valuable time here reading at all. The book was taken from her, she was questioned by a matronly guard in a rank customs booth, and then it was returned to her without explanation (the explanation would have been that it was not on the list of proscribed titles). The tourist had returned to her tour group dazed and thrilled by her brush with dictatorship. No Russian succeeded in parting her from the book after this adventure, so once the book’s arrival became known by a friend of a friend of her Intourist guide, it earned the woman an invitation to a party at Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha. The book was passed around and casually examined by writers and editors who risked hernias trying to feign their indifference.

“The word made flesh,” announced Anton
Basmanian, his grin as sour as good Russian rye bread. He passed the book to me. The Canadian was at his side, warily observing the transaction.

In my hands, the object seemed to transmit a kind of fragile radiance. I caressed the silky dust jacket, printed as boldly as a call to revolution. Our books were rarely published with dust jackets. On the back cover were voiced shouts of praise from Norman Mailer, Alberto Moravia, and Graham Greene. Inside the back cover the author herself was pictured, her eyes and hair luminous, her torso sleek in a tight red pullover. Her posture and scowl were defiant. But despite the shock that was delivered by the book’s wrapper, nothing prepared me for the appearance of the words on the printed page. The type was large, the print so sharply defined that I imagined that it would have been legible even to a non-English speaker. My first thought was that this wasn’t a novel, it was a
product,
something like a tube of toothpaste.

Our own books were such paltry affairs, pretty much identical in their physical form, their paper coarse and their type small, dense, and erratum-infested. Their bindings were easily broken. Although I never considered our books “bad” for that—the quality of a book did not reside in its physical presence, did it?—I could not help but be impressed by Marina’s. With a glass of Armenian cognac in my left hand and the open book in my right, I began reading the translation, my eyes gliding over the voluptuous Latinate letters like (I imagined) a Cadillac on a California highway, the heft and texture of the book massaging and soothing my critical faculties. I ascertained at
once that the translation had been performed competently by some émigré who was no worse a writer than Marina. Part of me acquiesced in the seduction performed by the book’s material body; the other part, the critic-writer part, coolly informed me, trying not to raise its voice, that my original evaluation was correct, that the novel was shallow in thought and inept in its execution.

Yet I dimly heard the tourist murmur that Marina’s book was selling well after having been favorably and even enthusiastically reviewed by the leading American literary publications. Marina had received tens of thousands of dollars for the novel in advance of its publication and would receive even more once the receipts were counted.

This news worked through me like a poison: the
market
liked her work. Each copy sold for nearly seven dollars. This was in a country where readers were offered a vast choice of attractively packaged books, plus a variety of other leisure distractions that we could barely comprehend, yet a sizable number of Americans chose to read Marina’s novel and paid for it in hard currency. For all the approval, comforts, and forest-clearing print runs bestowed upon her more-celebrated elders in the union, it was Marina Burchatkina who was a real-world success. If I could have been so wrong in my critical assessment of her talent, how could I be so sure of my own? Stupefied, I handed the book back to the tourist.

“And are you a writer too?” she asked brightly, in English.

I nodded.

“Would I have read anything you’ve written?”

“No,” I said.

Lydia never saw the book, having drifted to a less populous section of the garden, and as we walked the few dusk-softened blocks back to our dacha, she was unmoved by my descriptions of Marina’s book and the selfdoubts it had engendered.

“She’s not a talented writer.”

“Well, someone must think so,” I said. “The publisher. The readers. Norman Mailer, for God’s sake.”

We had just reached a turn in the road. Lydia halted there and tilted her head. She was listening to a bird. I prepared to wait it out. I was usually indifferent to bird song, rarely distinguishing the cry of Bird A from that of Bird B. Yet by some trick of the evening, by the thickened light or the taste of the air or the cognac, I found myself not only attending the bird, but in pursuit of its climb up the musical scale. The song was not pretty. Yet in its ungainliness and rawness there was something ancient that resonated from the age when birds sang without men to hear them. The song was distinctly its own; this was Bird Z.

Then it stopped. We resumed our walk.

“Rem, look at the pornography and detective fantasies that sell millions in the West. The market is the
worst
judge of talent. So what if a few thousand Americans buy Burchatkina’s book? Compare that with the hundreds of thousands of Russians who will read one of our talented, serious authors in a low-cost edition—and then save that book as a treasure in their family bookcase.”

We walked on a bit, silently reflecting upon the great
spill of sex and violence, dishonesty and tawdriness, that spewed from the West’s printing presses. I had no illusions that the same material would fail to sell well here, making millionaires of unscrupulous writers. Only the vigilance of the writers’ union and Glavlit, the government censorship agency, prevented our literature from being eroded and degraded by commercial exploitation.

Lydia asked, “And how do you know that the market really finds her talented? Talent may not be the only selling point. She’s a contemporary Russian writer. She’s a young woman. Merely being published in the West gives her a political aura. Americans are buying her out of curiosity.”

It wasn’t the novel they were selling, it was the author. This was something I had previously not considered, but knew was true. In the West, literature might not be entangled in political considerations, but it could certainly be knotted in nonliterary commercial ones. I knew that if anything was heavily enough advertised it would sell (our newspapers were always writing about the useless trinkets that, thanks to advertising, Americans thought they could not live without). Even the endorsements on the back cover were not necessarily sincere; they had certainly been solicited, as some kind of favor to someone in the publishing house. This went on all the time. Nevertheless, the fact was this: her novel was being published in America and mine wasn’t.

“Her picture’s on the book jacket,” I murmured. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she’s very attractive.”

“Is she?”

I searched Lydia’s face for an ironic smirk or grimace,
but her question was asked in earnest. I was taken aback. She knew Marina, had attended parties at which Marina had been marked as the most attractive and glamorous guest. I could recall twice when Marina’s presence caused a palpable strain in a party’s superstructure, at fracture points of longing and envy—or so I thought at the time. Hanging in midair by its typographical hook, Lydia’s question now made me wonder if the young author’s beauty was not so obvious. There had been no strain at these parties; I had imagined it. Was there some cosmetic defect to which I had been blinded? Usually it was the other way around: a girl’s attractiveness would obscure her personal faults, sometimes catastrophically. Now it was disquieting to have it suggested that Marina’s beauty was not self-evident, that there was something more than superficial to my desire. Lydia stared, waiting for my answer, and it seemed that she noticed my confusion, but that might have been a misperception as well.

The fall passed in a blur of wet streets and mud. Construction debris flowed over onto Gertsena from the new Prospekt Kalinina, which had obliterated the seedy old Arbat neighborhood and put in its place high-rises gleaming with the optimism of the new age. The jackhammers could be heard in my office. As I had expected, publication in the West heightened Marina’s celebrity at home, and there was talk of electing her to the presidium of the union’s youth section. I had again established winter quarters in our flat, while Lydia burrowed into her dacha
solitude. Our ambiguous conversation of the summer, as I recalled it, proved to be a scratch on the pane of our marriage. My memory would skid past the intervening weeks and snag on that walk back to our dacha. I would wonder about my assessment of Marina’s work and her beauty. I lay awake in my bed, listening to the sounds of the city I didn’t know, a city of certitude. The city in which I dwelled was cast in shadows.