The Commissariat of Enlightenment (5 page)

A
muddled image of Russia dashed to pieces eventually accompanied Gribshin into sleep. He took comfort in it and as his sleep deepened the image muddled further and acquired a solid clairvoyance. Russia
would
be dashed to pieces. Soon he found himself being tugged awake by the morning light.

The room was no more charming than it had been in darkness: the walls were still stained and cracked and the room stank of tobacco. The icon had lost its moonlit radiance. The house was quiet. Woolly-headed from sleep, Gribshin washed his face with cold water from the basin.

In the front room the old couple who had given him admittance the night before were gone. Gribshin’s nose twitched, unsuccessfully fishing for the scents of breakfast. As he was about to open the door outside, he noticed a human figure perched on a stool in the corner’s shadows, studying her hands intently, as if wondering how they had come to be attached to her wrists. She seemed unaware of his existence.

Her face’s passive, self-indulgent expression and her un-combed brown hair suggested that she was about thirteen. It oc
curred to Gribshin that the girl might be mentally deficient—and then also that she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Thirteen was young to be a mother, even in Russia. Yet some of the prostitutes he had known in Moscow had hardly been older; none had been very much older. Gribshin supposed that the child’s father was unknown. An epidemic of bastards had descended upon the country.

“You there,” he said. “Good morning.”

The girl didn’t raise her head. Unlike the rest of her body, her hands were delicately formed, with long, uncalloused, vividly articulated fingers.

“Dear, is it possible to get some tea? I’ll pay for it. Please, I beg you to bring me the samovar.”

The girl offered no indication that she heard him. He gave up and left the post-house, looking around the yard for the old man and the woman. The little settlement off the road seemed deserted now. Gribshin shook his head at the lack of tea and walked back to the railway station.

When he arrived he found that the scene had changed little in a few hours, except for the even greater number of journalists and curiosity-seekers on the station platform and around the stationmaster’s house. In the grayness of the morning the faces of Astapovo’s visitors were imbued with a puzzling luminosity. It came from expectation, Gribshin supposed, and also from being at the center of global scrutiny. The Count hadn’t died that night, but that was all that was known of his condition.

The Pathé film crew was to be found in the passenger waiting room, installing a cinematography camera in preparation for the morning medical report. Distracted by the failure of an interior stage light, Meyer nodded absently when Gribshin told him that he had been refused lodging in the press car. Gribshin went to
work replacing the ruined lamp with one from the precious cache of Jupiters with which they always traveled.

As he descended from the ladder, reporters filed into the room, scores of them, mostly Russians, but also representatives of the press from throughout Europe, as well as from America, Japan, and even India. Soon they exceeded the designated capacity of the waiting room, which until this week had never seen anything close to its designated capacity and was more accustomed to giving shelter to a solitary peasant with a twine-bound satchel on his way to the next station.

The reporters did not speak to each other about their competition for standing space, but the first ripples of jostling motion stirred through them. The tension in the packed room swelled and seemed to liquefy, pooling around Meyer’s big cinematography camera, which had been placed toward the front of the room and now blocked the view of the reporters pushed behind it. Smaller puddles of restlessness accumulated around the conventional cameras that other newspaper representatives had placed by the lectern. The reporters sweltered in the heat generated by the stage lamps and the mass of rank human flesh wrapped in overcoats. Their murmurs built to a rumble like distant heat lightning.

As they waited for Dr. Makovitsky, one of the reporters moved forward into the cinematography camera’s line of sight, crossing the unmarked barrier offhandedly respected by his colleagues. At that moment a bald and whiskered man in a black coat appeared in the doorway. Meyer signalled to Gribshin.

The reporters who had remained near the door, so that they would reach the telegraph office ahead of their colleagues, shouted the first questions: “Is he still alive? Is today the day?”

This entrance was the shot Meyer wanted. As the reporters surged forward, Gribshin pushed hard to his side against the man
obstructing the camera. Although he looked away as he did this, pretending to be no more than another reporter trying to get close to Makovitsky, his weight was directed in a specific, deliberate direction and a good part of it was administered by his elbow. The reporter stumbled. By the time he regained his balance the space had been cleared.

“Bloody hell, what the fuck is this?” The fellow turned. It was the Englishman who had taken his bunk.

Gribshin said evenly, “Stay out of the way of the camera.”

Khaitover shoved him back, without any pretense about the reason. Gribshin stood squarely in place. As Makovitsky reached the front of the waiting room, the two men squirmed against each other. Soundlessly, other conflicts played out around them.

Makovitsky carried a sheet of notes, his forbearance against the tumult nearly mystical. Indeed, he was a mystic of sorts, a Hungarian Slovak who had come to Yasnaya Polyana to join his spiritual leader years ago. He squinted against the stage lights, his hairless forehead as bright as a minor sun. As seen by the cinematography camera, he stood with a framed lithograph of the Tsar on the wall behind his right shoulder. A nice touch, totally unintentional. At some moment of the doctor’s own choosing, without any preparatory throat-clearing, he began reading. It cut off the murmuring din.

“The Count suffered restlessness and discomfort during the first half of the night,” Makovitsky announced, speaking to a point somewhere within the mechanism of the camera, which, of course, could not hear him at all. His gaze was direct and his voice a somber monotone. The whirring of the camera’s clockwork was the only other sound in the waiting room and it suffused through the chamber like the air itself. “He dropped off to a relatively undisturbed sleep after twelve in the evening. At seven in the
morning a fever of 100.1 was recorded, down from 100.9. His pulse was 110, and I recorded his breathing at 36 to the minute. This morning he’s passed in and out of sleep and has taken several spoonfuls of kasha. He remains very weak. That is all.”

Makovitsky didn’t step away at once. Several moments passed in which he continued to gaze into the camera. He must have observed, perhaps unconsciously, that facial expressions were always prolonged in the cinema. The audience would not hear his speech but it would see him, or rather it would witness the spectacle. The spectacle would mean something. The Spectacle of Dr. Dushan Makovitsky: the doctor wished for it to represent steadfastness.

This was the morning medical report. Two more would follow later that day, and although they would not differ much from the morning session, Meyer always kept the camera rolling. Hours and hours of stock were consumed for every minute of the animated newspaper, or topical, that would actually reach the cinema, burlesque, and exhibition halls where it would be shown. That morning Gribshin hired two local men, sturdy as bullocks and with no greater aptitude for cinematography, to attend the press conferences. He emphasized the need to keep the space between Meyer’s camera and the doctor always unobstructed.

The principal of Kolya’s gymnasium had exited his first cinematography exhibition gravely disturbed. “This is not life,” he had declared to his students in an urgently convened assembly. “It is the gray shadow of life, gray figures passing soundlessly across a gray landscape. And in this fantasy world men have discovered an opiate that they value more than actual life, that they confuse with real life.” He forbade the students from attending the cinema but raised no practical hindrance. Kolya went nearly every day after
class let out: to the Illusion on Tverskaya, just a few doors from where he would later go to work for Meyer; also to the Kinophone in the Solodnikov Arcade, the Grand Parisian Electro Theater at Sretenka Gate, the Volcano on Taganskaya Square, the Moderne Cinema in the Metropol, and countless others that flickered to existence for a few weeks on the Arbat or in the alleyway burlesque halls.

All over the world men, women, and children stared at cinema screens for hours at a time, alert and motionless, backs straight and arms at their sides—a posture still relatively unfamiliar. The cinema had seized the human imagination. Now we saw ourselves as if filmed, flat and inaudible, inhabitants of flickering, rectangular space, and novelists began composing their literary scenes as if the protagonists were viewed through camera lenses, engaging in brief episodes separated by blackouts. Music was written more literally, to suggest visual imagery. Even our dreams became cinematic and we heard the projectors clicking in our sleep, as nocturnal sprockets entered and withdrew from sprocket holes. The human appetite for the moving picture proved to be all-consuming and corrupting: wives concealed from their husbands their midday attendance, husbands brought their mistresses, and the poor withdrew their savings. Some Moscow cinemas were attached to brothels. Church fathers reminded the faithful that Saint Augustine had warned against
curiositas,
curiosity, “the lust of the eyes.”

Russia had arrived at the cinema on time and now leaned forward on the bench hip-to-hip with the other nations of the world. Although many early Russian cinematographers prospered, most of the shadows falling on the screen were French in origin, produced by the brothers Pathé and the brothers Lumiere. The public raptly took in their dramas and circus acts, “actualities” that
were descriptive views of distant places, and reports of topical interest.

The empire itself filled the screen as European filmmakers fanned out across the country, often encountering obstacles from a regime distrustful of the cinematic enterprise. The first news-reel ever made in Russia had been confiscated by the police. It recorded the inauspicious events in connection with the crowning of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896, when the gendarmes beat back a crowd of spectators surging forward to receive packaged souvenirs (a goblet, a piece of sausage, a piece of cake, and a bag of candy). In the melee, a viewing stand collapsed and five thousand people lost their lives. The cinema pioneer Francis Doublier, then seventeen years of age, filmed it all before he and his equipment were arrested. The ceremony and evening ball went on as scheduled and the tragedy, imprisoned within three cans of nitrate celluloid, was never officially acknowledged or reported in the press.

Although the Count’s death was expected at any time, Meyer explained their work at Astapovo as if they would be there for years. He told Gribshin to expect three daily press conferences, two daily train arrivals, and continuous comings and goings at the door to the stationmaster’s house: all of it to be filmed.

The days passed more slowly for the newspaper correspondents, who mostly occupied themselves with intrigues involving the telegraph office, which was located in a dim chamber outside the waiting room. Several of the foreign reporters had employed local people to secure places in the queue before the news conferences began. The Russian journalists retaliated by shoving the peasants aside and thrusting their bulletins through the grate at a
perfectly composed young man who accepted only those cables that were accompanied by bank notes, in the descending order of their denominations and, once the foreign reporters joined in this practice, their descending rates of exchange against the ruble.

Meanwhile Khaitover organized a pool wagering the day and hour of the Count’s death. The arrival of two lung specialists from Moscow excited a flurry of interest among the punters.

The press conferences became more unruly as the days went on and the reporters, pressed by their editors for more news, pressed Makovitsky for details about the Count’s condition—could he sit up? could he speak? what were his current beliefs about the afterlife?—and especially about whether the Countess would be allowed to say farewell to her husband once she arrived in Astapovo. Makovitsky avoided an answer, explaining that he was competent only to make medical judgments. In his medical opinion, then, would seeing the Countess kill the Count? Embarrassed by the direct question, he didn’t reply.

The reporters knew that it was Vladimir Chertkov, the Count’s leading disciple, who was making the most important decisions, including the one demanding that the Countess stay home.

Strangers drawn to Astapovo from distant parts of Russia and the world enlivened the vigil. There were pilgrims and mystics—many of the mystics were the Count’s followers; others were his severest critics—revolutionists of every feather, holy fools, and medical frauds who offered to relieve him of his pneumonia. At any given hour you could be introduced to two or three men claiming to be the Messiah. They tended to look very much alike, in the length and snowiness of their beards and in the electrifyingly clear gaze of their eyes, and in their poverty and their lack of hygiene, and in their violent refusal to have anything to do with each other.

Gribshin took no part in the betting pool. He was taciturn and retiring, intent on his work. He took a concealed pleasure in his work, particularly in the minutiae of the cinematographic equipment’s maintenance and in the cinematographic art itself. Meyer patiently and often expansively explained the intentions behind the shots he framed. Standing next to the cameraman as he stooped by the eyepiece, Gribshin was located exactly where his ambition had foreseen him: at the center of history. In the last eighteen months, he and Meyer had filmed the rescue of survivors from a collapsed mine in Kostroma, a pogrom in Galicia, the Tsar’s visit to Moscow, and an aeroplane flight over the Neva. It had been like sailing with Columbus or standing beside Kutuzov at Borodino.