Maxim places a new photograph on the desk.
In it a ballerina floats above the Mariinsky stage. Her left arm ascends into the brilliant wedge of an unseen spotlight. A corona of feathers laurels her black hair. The thick fingers of a silhouetted man corset her waist. He lifts her, throws her, carries or receives her. Photographed from backstage, the first five rows of spectators are visible.
“Who is this?”
Maxim shrugs. The woman is no one. That we have been given her photograph is proof enough that she no longer dances.
But in this photograph, she still has a tutu, tights, a full house, roses in water and champagne on ice in her dressing room. Still has a career. A home. A diploma. A birth certificate.
I know I should be priming the airbrush, bringing it to her pancaked cheek, but she looks so much like my brother’s wife—ridiculous, I know—and to deface her seems a cruelty inflicted on her, on this piece of paper, on the ink in the airbrush, on any hand that will ever hold it, on any eye that will ever see it.
Nothing like this has ever happened to me before, I swear. I wait for the sensation to subside. Maxim must have noticed my expression and he asks if I am unwell.
“Dizzy,” I tell him. “Light-headed.”
“You should eat your lunch, rather than wandering through the tunnels,” he says, and suggests we save the dancer for the next day.
By the time I climb the wooden steps to street level, the sunset is a coppery coin on the horizon. It is late October and the winter closes in. Soon night will wrap around the earth and all Leningrad will become a tunnel I walk through.
Pastel palaces line the Neva, designed by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli or his later imitators; I have forgotten which are authentic and which are counterfeit. Rastrelli died here in 1771, and one can see the later additions of expanded drives, garages, antennas, barred windows, iron doors. Do these architectural changes undermine Rastrelli’s original vision, or would he, as a fellow court artisan, understand that like one’s politics, morality, and convictions, one’s art is subordinate to the mandates of power?
A poster exclaims, WOMEN, DO NOT BE FOOLS, PARTAKE IN SPORT! Another displays a blindfolded man walking off a cliff: ILLITERATES ARE BLIND MEN WHO BELIEVE THEY SEE!
My spectacles fog as I enter my flat. I search for the vestige of furnace heat. A Polish émigré invented the radiator on this very street some eighty years ago; I’m still waiting for one. When I was promoted five years ago, a team of underlings, enough to field a soccer squad, swept through my flat and confiscated every image bearing my face. A precaution, they had explained.
My walls are empty but for a hanging portrait of our vozhd, Stalin. The portrait has been vignetted so Stalin’s face seems to float freely in downy light, like a saint or savior in an old icon. If heaven can only exist on earth, then God can only be a human.
I flip it over. On the back, I have painted one of Henri Rousseau’s jungle cats, a spotted golden glimmer peering through verdant leaves. A sense of belonging seeps from me in a sigh. Now I am at home.
IN MY generation the position of correction artist is a consolation prize for failed painters. I attended the Imperial Academy of Arts for a year, where I made small still lifes of fruit bowls and flower vases, each miniature as realistic as a photograph, before moving on to portraiture, my calling, the most perfect art. The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose, and mouth that compose a sitter’s face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw.
“We have art in order not to die of the truth,” wrote Nietzsche in a quote I kept pinned to my workbench. Even as a student I knew we die of art as easily as of any instrument of coercion. Of course a handful of true visionaries treated Nietzsche’s words as edict rather than irony, but now they are dead or jailed, and their works are even less likely than mine to grace the walls of the Hermitage. After the Revolution, churches were looted, relics destroyed, priceless works sold abroad for industrial machinery; I joined in, unwillingly at first, destroying icons while I dreamed of creating portraits, even then both a maker and eraser of human faces.
Soon I was approached by the security organs and given a position. Those who can’t succeed, teach. Those who can’t teach, censor the successes of others. Still I could have turned out worse; I’m told the German chancellor is also a failed artist.
Most censoring, of course, is done by publishers. A little cropping, editing, adjusting of margins can rule out many undesirable elements. This has obvious limitations. Stalin’s pitted cheeks, for instance. To fix them you’d have to crop his entire head, a crime for which your own head would soon follow. For such sensitive work, I am brought in. During one bleak four-month stretch, I did nothing but airbrush his cheeks.
During my early days in the department, I wasn’t entrusted with such delicate assignments. For my first year, I combed the shelves of libraries with the most recently expanded edition of Summary List of Books Excluded from Libraries and the Book Trade Network, searching for images of newly disgraced officials. This should be a librarian’s job, of course, but you can’t trust people who read that much.
I found offending images in books, old newspapers, pamphlets, in paintings or as loose photographs, sitting in portrait or standing in crowds. Most could be ripped out, but some censored images needed to remain as a cautionary tale. For these, obliteration by India ink was the answer. A gentle tip of the jar, a few squeezes of the eyedropper, and the disgraced face drowned beneath a glinting black pool.
Only once did I witness the true power of my work. In the reading room of the Leningrad State University library, which I often visited to pore over folios of pre-Revolutionary prints, I saw a young man in a pea jacket search a volume of bound magazines. He flipped halfway through the August 1926 issue to a group portrait of military cadets. The cadets stood in three stern rows, ninety-three faces in total, sixty-two of which I had, one by one, over two years, obliterated.
I still don’t know which among the sixty-two he had been searching for, or if his was among those thirty-one still unblackened faces. His shoulders slumped forward. His hand gripped the table for support. Something broke behind his wide brown eyes. A gasp escaped his lips before he choked the cry with his fist.
With a few ink droplets I had inflicted upon his soul a violence beyond anything my most loving portraits could have ever achieved. For art to be the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer.
“NO MORE idleness,” Maxim says. “Today we correct the dancer.”
“You are too eager, Maxim. Personal ambition doesn’t sit well on a socialist’s shoulders.”
He grunts. He may be science’s fullest proof that man is descended from monkey.
A few days have passed since we received the photograph of the disgraced dancer. I’ve hoped she’d be overlooked in the influx of other offending images. The anteroom is a shoulder-high maze of boxes growing taller by the day. Best not follow this to its natural conclusion.
Maxim readies the photograph on the table. My brother’s wife isn’t a ballerina. This isn’t her. This is no one I owe anything to. She is an enemy, a nonperson, she isn’t even there. I’ve airbrushed out Trotsky so many times that I know him by every mood and gesture, know him with the familiarity of a family member and have never felt regret, yet at the thought of erasing this single stranger something in me collapses over a hollow sphere of sadness.
Collect yourself, man.
“May I borrow your lighter?” Maxim asks, holding up a cigarette. I pass it to him and he lights his cigarette without taking his eyes from me.
He primes the airbrush and I load
a gray-scale paint canister. Beneath brief exclamations of smoke he observes as I airbrush the stage over the disgraced dancer’s legs, the faces of the audience over the dancer’s slender torso. She falls, I have decided, into her partner’s hands. She looks away from the audience, to the camera positioned at the back of the stage, through the open aperture, to me, her final audience, as I erase her eyes.
It takes such artistry, such visual perception to disappear a figure into the backdrop. With a magnifying glass and a thin paintbrush, I expunge her waist from the furrows that widen between her partner’s spread fingers. I airbrush her arms until all that remains is her left hand, stenciled in spotlight, like a windblown glove dancing with a lonesome man, and I leave it there while I finish.
There are moments of intense creative pleasure: The dancer’s right leg obscures the face of an adolescent in the front row, and in its place I paint a postage-stamp portrait of my brother, Vaska, when he was that age. Over the last two years I have inserted him into hundreds of photographs and paintings. Young Vaskas. Old Vaskas. Vaskas in crowds listening to Lenin. Vaskas laboring in fields and factories. He hangs on the walls of courthouses, ministries, schools, prisons, even the NKVD headquarters, where if you look closely you will see Vaska glaring at Yevgeny Tuchkov, the man who made him disappear.
Do I worry I’ll be caught? Please. My superiors are too focused on who I take out to notice who I put in.
The dancer’s left hand still dangles in the air. My decision isn’t decided so much as felt. I set down the airbrush as one might set down a fork when nauseous. I will leave the disgraced dancer’s hand where it is, where it should be, right there, a single hand waving for help, waving good-bye, applauding no one, a single hand that may have once held my neck while a voice in my ear asked for help.
I slip the corrected photograph into a stack of a half-dozen others. Maxim flips through them as I clean the airbrush with an oil cloth. He grunts. Has he noticed?
“Is everything all right, Comrade?” I ask, unable to steady the shake in my voice.
He smiles warmly. Tusks of smoke slide from his nostrils.
“I was only admiring your work,” he says. “It’s so easy to overlook the beauty of what we do, isn’t it?”
We spend the afternoon working through the most recent box. When Maxim plods to the anteroom, I slip the photograph of the dancer from the stack. It’s irrational, a madman’s instinct, but what if her hovering hand is noticed? Will I be punished for my carelessness?
Maxim returns to the office before I can correct or return it to the stack, and I hide it in my lap. “Are you well, Comrade?” he asks. “You look feverish.”
I blot my forehead with my shirtsleeve. “Too much time underground, perhaps.”
Maxim nods and suggests we end early today. I nod, gratefully. Not knowing what else to do, I fold the photograph into my overcoat pocket. I am a dozen paces into the tunnel when he calls. “Comrade, I think you have forgotten something.”
The fever Maxim suspected suddenly feels real. There is no excuse for taking a photograph from the premises. The suspicion cast makes it a capital offense. I hold the doorframe.
“Yes, Comrade?” I manage.
Maxim eyes me. He knows. He knows.
“You’re growing forgetful, Comrade,” he says, and holds up my silver cigarette lighter.
AS CHILDREN in the years leading up to the Revolution, my brother and I played monarchists and revolutionaries, switching sides a half-dozen times before dinner. At night we rapped against the wall separating our bedrooms in the prisoner’s code invented by the Decembrists. The code arranged the alphabet into a graph of five rows and six columns. The tap for each letter corresponded to its row and column number. We wrote with sound on a wall that divided us no more than a letter divides sender from recipient.
By the time we were old enough to mistake ourselves for men, I’d already turned toward Bolshevism. Vaska found comfort in the Orthodox Church. We idolized the dead martyrs of our respective causes. One evening my comrades beat Vaska with such ferocity he nearly became one. His left eye had swollen shut and his nose bent at an awful angle when he entered my grandmother’s kitchen. I grabbed his hands. Only his knuckles were unbruised.
“You must run away when they come after you,” I told him.
“No, I must stay,” he said, glaring at me.
“Then at least put up a fight. This is shameful.”
He leaned forward, offering his busted face as evidence, and said, “Do you think this shames me?”
It was the last time we spoke. For many years after that, I believed that I knew so little of his life I would never betray him.
In August 1931, agents of the OGPU told me that Vasily Markin would be arrested within a fortnight on charges of religious radicalism. They told me my brother had married, that his wife was pregnant. They gave me his address. It was a test. It must have been. So much was lost in communications between raions that had I warned Vaska, had he fled Leningrad, he might still be alive. Had I done that, had the agents raided his apartment in the early hours and found him missing, they would have come for me instead—I believe this, I must, because if I begin to wonder, if I begin to think maybe they tipped me off as a professional courtesy, so that I could warn Vaska, if I begin to think…all roads in that direction lead to darkness.
That October, after the arrest, trial, and execution, the agents returned with a brown envelope. “Have a seat, Citizen,” the senior among them said, and gestured to my divan, where I’d just been eating dessert. I followed his extended hand, suddenly a guest in my own home.
The officers sat on either side of me, making the divan feel like the backseat of a Black Crow police van, and the senior agent opened the envelope and slid a photograph across the heat-ringed coffee table. If I gasped, it was from shock, from terror, from some dark thing rending inside me that might have been the birth pangs of remorse. I had corrected some thousand photographs in that year alone, but not one had I recognized, not one had I been part of.
The portrait the agent held out had been taken in 1906, on a Wednesday. My father, a haberdasher, had closed the shop that morning. He was well regarded, at least in haberdashery circles, having built his reputation on a pearl netting kokoshnik that had made a minor countess the talk of the Winter Palace ballroom. My mother did the bookkeeping, the restocking, the hiring of seamstresses—nearly everything, she felt, but placing the hat on the buyer’s head. She had grown up on potatoes and made sure her children grew up on meat.
We dressed in our finest clothes that Wednesday in 1906 and took the train from Pavlovsk to Petersburg to the photographer’s studio. It had been our mother’s idea, as most good ideas were. A portrait, by camera rather than paintbrush, would convey in a single image the forward-looking optimism she had spent her life enacting. Peacock plumage roosted on my mother’s head. In the photograph, it is dishwater gray. I stand in front of her with a faint smile. Not even the noose of my necktie strangled the excitement of having my picture taken. And beside me, wearing a matching necktie, a matching smile, his cowlick roughly brushed, his broad face whittling to a slender nose, my brother stood stiffly, gazing through the lens, through time, to meet my eyes as I sat framed between the agents who had executed him.
After leaving the photographer’s studio, my parents had taken us to the Petersburg Zoological Gardens. It had been a terrible decade for the zoo—the grounds had been largely abandoned and many of the cages were empty—but I was a child, and didn’t understand what the empty cages meant. What still lived in that zoo was a revelation. I had never before spied an animal larger than a milk cow, more ferocious than a hungry dog. Who could have imagined a beast as strange and melancholy as a giraffe? But of every animal we saw that afternoon, I remember none more clearly than the leopard. Loose-limbed and lanky. Nostrils spouting narrow triangles of steam. Claws clicking coded messages across the concrete floor. Eyes all pupil. Each step unfurling through the spine. An inconceivable creatur
e at which Vaska and I first marveled, then threw bread crumbs.
“You recognize this, I’m sure,” the senior agent said, nodding to Vaska in the portrait. “I trust you know who to correct.”
By this point I had moved from India ink to airbrushing. It was no longer enough to obliterate a traitor’s face; the inky mask acknowledged that a traitor could exist, an assertion that quickly becomes a traitorous act in itself. History is the error we are forever correcting.
The senior agent guided me to my workbench.
“Is it necessary to do this now?” I asked.
“The work of building socialism never ceases. It doesn’t take leisure hours.” He frowned at my dessert on the table. “It doesn’t eat sugar plums.”
I flattened the photograph, loaded the paint into the airbrush like a bullet into a pistol. With the patience of an Ottoman miniaturist, I corrected my brother. I began with his black leather shoes, slowly dissolving them into the floor they stood upon. Then his stockings and breeches. Our father stood behind him, and with slow, even strokes, I airbrushed an approximation of our father’s trousers over my brother, so it seemed I was not erasing Vaska but folding him in our father’s clothes, where he would stay safe and warm, his skin pressed to our father’s. I remembered drawing him when we were children, paying him in sweets to sit for me when he was angry, tearful, exhausted, contrite, merciful, joyous. I had never felt closer to him than when I had felt some essence of his soul pressing its way through the pencil to the page.