PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (29 page)

The confused nature of the evening’s events, and particularly their lack of record or apparent consequence, invited me to believe that they had never happened. At night I lay awake, my fever breaking once again, and tried
to recall what I had seen and felt. Repeatedly I found myself in that elongated moment when the women at the base of Pushkin’s statue unfurled their banners. I stood there, squinting, trying to hold the moment long enough to read what was on the banners. Letters and words swirled along the cloth—fragments of political declarations, fragments of declarations of love, lines from poetry and novels, some of them my own—but they never remained there long enough to be understood. Always, in the end, the banner would come up empty, a stretch of white cloth, anti-Soviet merely by its existence, but offering nothing to be read.

I never said anything about the demonstration to Sorokin and he never brought it up with me. I was grateful for that. Meanwhile, Marina kept herself out of view and out of gossip. Many times I dialed the first five digits of her telephone number, merely for the pleasure of doing so, but with no intention of dialing the sixth.

Springtime came and my head began to clear. I tossed aside the notes for my novel and began anew. Then came an unusually sweltering summer, an odd summer, really, unnervingly quiet and suffused with expectation, which I mistook for anticipation of the summer Olympics to be held in early September. The press and television were consumed by oracular pronouncements on the prospects of our swimmers, our runners, our acrobats, and especially our weightlifters. Several of my better-placed friends and colleagues had wrangled assignments to cover the games or to join the government delegation to Mexico City. As I gingerly returned to social life, I found
that my friends did not want to speak of literature, but rather of Janis Lusis, our promising javelin thrower.

I managed to get caught up in the pre-games fervor, at least to some extent, despite the absence of a radio at the dacha and our avoidance of the news from one day to the next. This was part of my convalescence, to seal myself in the dacha with Lydia, her gardening implements, and our books. As August wound down and the afternoons became chilly, I looked with some regret toward my return to the city. Lydia began harvesting and canning her tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, and cherries, while I watched her from over the novel I pretended to read. She wore a light, full-length dress as she leaned over the rows, not bending her knees. A breeze skittered around her ankles and for a moment plastered the dress against the backs of her legs and thighs. I rose from the hammock to walk off my hard-on and strolled over to the hedge.

The street was quiet. A lone babushka, Vadim Surkov’s mother-in-law, pulled a wagon up the street, laying in her firewood early. She was an elderly woman, bloated beneath her housedress, a squall of wrinkles around her toothless mouth. We had never spoken, though Surkov’s dacha was located two doors down. Now as she spotted me, her eyes danced beneath her cataracts.

She laughed, a kind of mad cackle, and shouted, “The fascists are in for a hot time now. The whole lot of them.”

I smiled. “What fascists?”

“You know, sonny, the counterrevolutionaries. The wreckers. The Right Oppositionists.”

The phrase made me smile again. I assumed she had
become distracted from the exertion of pulling the cart, or simply from being old, and had imagined herself to be living in another time. It was a remarkable phenomenon, entirely forgivable, and I thought of all that her generation had seen and suffered. I should have offered to help her with the cart. Instead, to draw her out, to keep the dream going for my own instruction, I asked her, “These Right Oppositionists, who might they be?”

“Dubcek,” she spat. “And his ilk! They’ve locked ’em up, all of ’em! The bastards will hang from the lampposts.”

Muttering and sniggering, she made her way down the street. I turned to Lydia, who was working so intently that she had not heard the remark. Her face was entirely composed, self-contained, satisfied with the dirt under her fingertips. Without a word I hurried from the garden, down the block in the opposite direction, to Sasha Nasedkin’s dacha.

This had been the scene of a particularly raucous party just the week before. We had attended it, but left early: by chance, Lydia and I had looked up at the same time and communicated to each other the urgent desire to read for a half hour before turning in. This murmured agreement—this congruency of desires—surprised us. We giggled at it. The party had continued in our absence and, like every great party in those last days, had ended at least one marriage and did not wind down until the morning sun had lifted itself above the treetops.

Now the house had the air of centuries-long abandonment. No one was in the untended garden, where some chairs had been tipped over and an empty vodka bottle lay in a vine-choked, crumbling fountain. The
windows to the house were closed, but the doorway gaped like a vacant tooth.

“Sasha? Hello? Anyone home? It’s me, Rem!”

The inside of the dacha smelled of trash and spoiled food. Papers were scattered everywhere, on the kitchen table and on the windowsills. I found something odd at the foot of the warm stove: half a typed manuscript, the
bottom
half, charred around the upper edges. In the next room there was an insistent radio buzzing noise, which I recognized at once as the sound of the BBC being jammed.

“Sasha?”

Between a bottle of Gordon’s gin and one of Schweppe’s tonic, a juice glass was filled to the top. Sasha stared at it, ignoring me. He was disheveled, in some ratty dressing grown, unshaven and red eyed. The BBC rattled in the radio like a trapped bee.

“It’s Dubcek?” I asked. “I just heard.”

Sasha gave a little half laugh.

“Rem Krilov, always well connected and well informed ... Not to worry, ha ha. Our good Czechoslovakian friends ... fraternal brothers, friendly friends ... socialist allies. They’ve invited us to a party. They asked us to bring our tanks ... I’m such a great literary critic, how come I couldn’t read the writing on the wall?”

“When did this happen?”

“Can’t you tell by how drunk I am? Two days ago.”

I pointed into the next room. “And the manuscript?”

“Nothing really, Rem. Just some housecleaning. Just cleaning house, getting ready for the next decade, ha ha.
But I don’t have the balls for cleaning house. I pulled it out of the fire. What can they do to me? I haven’t invited them, ha ha.”

Before I left I squatted by the stove and picked up the remains of the manuscript. It was a memoir. Balanced on my haunches, able to read no more than ten or eleven lines of each page, I nonetheless recognized that it was a work of enormous accomplishment, honest and unrestrained, like nothing that had ever been published in our literature. Its phrases even now resonate in my head (later I tried to copy the words into my notebook, but could never get them exactly right). I read the manuscript to the very end, taking perhaps more than an hour, never changing my position. Occasionally I heard Sasha stir behind me. He stretched a leg, he picked up his glass, he sighed, he drummed his fingers on the table. The BBC continued to hiss and moan. When I finished the manuscript, I opened the stove door and gently deposited the pages into the dimming fire.

I returned my stiff back and numb left leg to our dacha. Lydia was in the kitchen, preparing a ragout from a recipe in an Italian cookbook. The cookbook was one of several brought to Moscow by a visiting Italian publisher in the correct expectation that he would be showered with lapel pins and would want to give something in return. Lydia had made his acquaintance at a party and, though no lapel pins had been exchanged, the book became one of Lydia’s earthly treasures. When I told her the news, she raised her hand to her face and made a little soundless moue of pain. She looked back at the recipe. Stained and swollen, evidence of cosmopolitan tastes and foreign
contacts, the book was now enveloped in the aura of
samizdat.

Anyone who had spent an entire life in the Soviet Union—indeed, a week would have served, and been far more convenient—knew at once that the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia would be accompanied by a crackdown at home. I realized now that we had been expecting this always, even counting on it. The expectation had fevered our social gatherings, our love affairs, and, especially, our work. Night would follow day; it always did.

Most of the trips to Mexico City were canceled. The apartments of dissidents were searched, as were those of nonconformist journalists, lawyers, and trade unionists. A demonstration in Red Square lead to seven arrests, including the arrest of a woman wielding an empty baby carriage. On the carriage was hung the banner: “To Your Freedom and Ours!”—Aleksandr Herzen’s cry in defense of Polish rebels a century before. First Secretary Alexander Dubcek and his colleagues were abducted to Moscow and forced to recant the heresy of reform communism.

Even in the best of times, our news reports were delivered by radio and television in a harsh drone nearly devoid of information. Across the airwaves, the standard words and phrases churned and boiled like the Baltic in winter. After heralding the delivery of “urgent aid to the fraternal Czechoslovak people,” “in defense of peace,” a harsher tone was taken, with many references to “traitors” and “agents of world capital,” but the roar itself remained constant, an almost soothing accompaniment to one’s breakfast or dinner. This is how it had always been. And then one September morning, in this ocean of radio
noise, the words “Marina Burchatkina” surfaced like an enemy submarine.

I was home, making coffee in my bachelor kitchen and glumly looking ahead to my day’s work, which had faltered since my return from Peredelkino. Taking the broadcast of Marina’s name as an aural hallucination, I decided that my obsession with her had finally overcome my senses. I could still feel her touch echoing off my skin.

This acknowledgement meant that my life would be different now. I would have to pursue her, win her, and marry her; otherwise I would know no mental ease. I loved her. The hallucination then deepened, deforming reality itself. I heard the following:

“... outrage at her selfish and criminal anti-Soviet actions. We cannot understand how someone raised under Soviet rule, whose education and professional status were provided by the toil of common laborers, can so unscrupulously libel our way of life. Burchatkina’s letter serves only the interests of Western reactionary circles opposed to the efforts of the Soviet Union to foster peaceful coexistence. She who blackens her country and people and tries to turn back history deserves only contempt and indignation.”

I forced myself to finish breakfast, not fully understanding what I had just heard (but understanding enough). I dressed and hurried to the metro. The train arrived as I reached the platform and I was carried by the masses into the central car, whose atmosphere was thick with
the odors of garlic and sour milk. Pressed against my body, the other passengers showed me their faces of ash and their blind, watery eyes. They were not only my compatriots, they were my readers. Emerging from the Krasnopresnenskaya metro station, I deeply inhaled but failed to taste fresh air. Inside the Rostov mansion reigned a deep, muffled silence. A few colleagues crossed my path, but they didn’t look my way. Something had slightly altered the building’s dimensions, narrowing the foyer corridor and deepening the tread on the little steps down to the café. Desperate, I went to the publications office and found Anton Basmanian at a desk, studying a sheet of galleys.

He had gained some unbecoming weight in the last few years, especially in his jowls and belly. With his head down, the thinning of his hair was apparent. It was probably just as well that his wife had come up from Yerevan. Meanwhile, he had kept control of his journal by fluttering it to the right side of the innocuous.

“Anton,” I said.

He kept his eyes fixed on a line of type.

“Rem.”

“Tell me. What did I hear on Radio Beacon?”

“A Bach cantata, perhaps. ‘Sleepers Awake.’” Now he put down his pencil and looked up. He strained out a smile. His teeth were as gleamingly white as ever. “She wrote a so-called open letter to the Politburo. She appears to be a bit put out by Czechoslovakia.”

“It was published?”

“In
Le Monde, Corriere della Sera,
the
New York Times, Die Zeit.”

The title of each foreign publication struck me like a body blow. I collapsed into a folding chair. I had known that she had done something terrible, but nothing as terrible as this.

My mouth was parched when I spoke next. “Well, she’s finished.”

Anton chuckled, monstrously. “No, she’s just beginning. I haven’t told you the best part.”

“What?”

“The letter was written in Paris. She has a visiting lectureship at the Sorbonne. On what subject, I don’t know. In Kaluga she taught arts and crafts to twelve year olds.”

My brain had slowed nearly to a stop; I could barely make out Anton’s words. I felt as if I were still in the metro, surrounded by strangers. I closed my eyes and felt a filament of steam from a cup of espresso tickle my nostril hairs.

“She’s not coming back.” I tried to make it sound like a declarative sentence, but there was a childish, hopeful interrogative rising at the end.

He laughed at the possibility. She had already been stripped of her Soviet citizenship, of course.

Anton said, “I suppose you haven’t talked to Sorokin, or been by your office, have you?”

“I’ve just come in.”

“There’s a union petition against her. You’ll have to sign. And I suppose there’ll be a pro forma expulsion. That’ll be on the agenda, a real spectacle I’m sure.”

I slumped my shoulders.

“And let me give you some advice, Rem, my friend.”

I looked at him dejectedly.