Mother Russia (9781590209028)
“For God’s sake, Robespierre,” Mother Russia cries, tapping the counter with her fly swatter in annoyance, “get hold of yourself. Listen to them. The one with the sideburns and beard has honest fingernails.”
Pravdin turns on her. “If I’m worked up,” he retorts, “I’m worked up over a noneconomic activity.”
Nadezhda moves to his side, slips her hand into his, draws the back of his hand to her mouth and kisses it. Pravdin reddens at this very public gesture of affection, breathes deeply, calms down. “So what is it?” he inquires. “It must be life or death if you’re drinking Zoya’s infusions.”
The five men put their heads together in the middle of the table and hold a quick conference. “You’re at least a friend of his,” Pravdin hears the assistant rabbi whisper. Silence. Finally Friedemann T. scrapes back his chair, faces Pravdin, adjusts his overcoat that hangs like a cape from his shoulders, clears his throat.
“What we are here is Jewish,” Pravdin coaxes.
“Dear fellow, this is not a laughing matter,” Friedemann T. chastises Pravdin. “It appears that the rabbi here, and Aaron, and myself, have been approached separately by representatives of the government and informed that twenty-five exit visas would be delivered to the Jewish Committee if a certain Robespierre Pravdin could be prevailed upon to return whatever it is they want him to return.” Friedemann T. holds up a palm. “Once again I beg you not to say what it is they want. We don’t know, and it goes without saying we don’t want to know. Isn’t that right, gentlemen?”
The others nod in agreement.
“In any case,” Friedemann T. continues, “all of us here have a vested interest in this matter inasmuch as all of us have applied for exit visas. So we formed this delegation—”
Pravdin can’t believe his ears. “All of you want exit visas?”
Friedemann T. squirms uncomfortably. “All of us, yes.”
“Israel is where you want to go, Friedemann?”
“Israel and points west, yes,” Friedemann T. acknowledges. He takes a step toward Pravdin. “You’ve got to do this for me, Robespierre. I’m sick of always being on the outside and trying to get in. I’m fifty-seven years old. Fifty-seven! I’m sick of gate-crashing. I want a standing invitation for my old age.”
“Dear Robespierre,” Zoya says, “give them what they want. Nobody can say you didn’t walk on water.”
“Three of the exit visas will go to you,” the beardless assistant rabbi adds. “You can take anyone with you. Nowhere is it specified they have to be Jewish.”
“You don’t have the right to say no,” Aaron says emotionally. “We have families, futures—”
“What makes you think there is a future?” Pravdin taunts him, taunts them all. “What makes you think we’re not the point of time? Listen”—Pravdin sinks into a comic crouch, indicates with his eyes the walls have ears, continues in a stage whisper—“a while ago they offered one exit visa to get back what I have and they want. Today twenty-five. Tomorrow fifty maybe, a hundred even. All we have to do is hold out a month or two and we can get all the Jews out of Russia. All the goyim too; nowhere is it specified they have to be Jewish. Ha! Will the last goy to leave the country please close the lights! Picture it: a giant moving truck pulls up to the last wooden house in central Moscow and those funny men in blue raincoats start carrying in cartons of exit visas. Two hundred and thirty million of them. A mound—mound nothing, mountain!—of visas! We’ll flood Israel with immigrants, they won’t have room to turn around they’ll be so many of them. A line of immigrants stretching from Odessa to Haifa walking on water to the Promised Land! And I’ll be the one who did it. Robespierre Isayevich Pravdin, the man who got everyone out of Russia. Hero of Socialist Labor! The Order of the Red Star!! The Order of the Red Banner!!! The Order of Lenin even!!!! I’ll maybe take Brezhnev with me. Also the big bosses of the Writers’ Union. And all the bastards who turned down the Q-Tip. Listen, rabbi, you want to do something for the Jews? Stay in Russia and mind the store when we all leave.”
“You have no heart,” the beardless assistant rabbi laments.
“A heart is what I have,” Pravdin corrects him. ‘Wounded is what I thought it was, but it turns out, touch wood, to be only circumcised.”
CHAPTER 9
Pravdin sleeps
on his side …
Pravdin sleeps on his side, his back to Nadezhda, his arms hugging his torso as if he is in a straitjacket instead of pajamas. Snatches of song drift through his head. At times he remembers the words, not the music; at times the music, not the words. He struggles to join the two together as if they were halves of a broken saucer, but the glue (squeezed from a tube of depilatory cream) doesn’t hold. Frustrated, he tosses onto his back, is suddenly pricked into consciousness by an omen: an old man in the alley outside the house is sharpening knives on a pedal-driven wheel and calling out, in a singsong voice that has both the words and music, “Knives, scissors, blades of all manufacture, honed until they bleed.” Pravdin shuffles to the window, looks out over the eucalyptus branch on the sill to watch the peddler at his work. Feet pumping, he bends over his wheel and presses with three fingers of his left hand the blade against the grindstone. Soft silent sparks angle off in all directions: a miniature fireworks from the collision of molecular worlds maybe. Civilizations too small to be imagined, destroyed in the blink of the peddler’s goggled eye! Straining, Pravdin can almost make out a distant “Aiiiiiiii.” He shivers uncontrollably from tiny catastrophes, inaudible whimpers. Nadezhda comes up behind him, throws a shawl over his bony shoulders, draws him back toward the bed.
They make love in the dancing shafts of sunlight that slip through the leaves outside Nadezhda’s window. “Knives, scissors, blades of all manufacture,” the peddler’s chant reaches them from the cul-de-sac. Pravdin struggles to get his mind off worlds disintegrating without so much as a decibel count. “Honed until they bleed.” Nadezhda becomes aware of his softness, senses his lack of concentration, takes corrective action. Soon the bed springs and floorboards are drowning out the inaudible whimpers in Pravdin’s skull. Their bodies press together like halves of a broken saucer and off he comes—not an instant too soon.
Later, Nadezhda passes him a page from her notebook on which she has written: “You tossed during the night. Did you dream?”
“I dreamed I was trying to reconstruct a dream I wasn’t sure I ever had,” Pravdin replies sleepily. “Bits and pieces were all I got.”
“Give me a bit, give me a piece,” Nadezhda writes.
“There was something painfully bright, a searchlight maybe, stabbing toward me from far away,” he remembers. “It hurt my eyes so I squinted into the dream, which had the physical form of a tunnel, to cut the glare. As soon as I did that I could make out the scene: I was vacationing in a gigantic hotel on the Black Sea reserved for KGB interrogators. God knows how I got there, but there is where I got. They assumed I was one of them and started to ask me about my score, my techniques, my favorite cases. Criminal is what we are here, I told myself, so I gave them ten minutes of police bla-bla-bla. Something I said made them suspicious—probably the item about how I tortured suspects by scenting their cells with vaginal deodorant spray. Next thing, they had me strapped to an animal I was afraid to identify and something painfully bright like a searchlight was stabbing toward me from very far away. It hurt my eyes so I squinted into the dream, which had the physical form of a tunnel, to cut the glare. And so forth and so on.”
“Your dreams are like cylinders on a player piano,” Nadezhda writes. “The same thing keeps coming around again.”
“Also my life,” Pravdin mutters.
Nadezhda passes him a note she has obviously written the night before. “Zoya wants you to return the original manuscripts and so do I. Don’t argue, Robespierre. Neither of us realized how stubborn you were when we got you into this. I remember your story about making sandals from watch-straps, but I didn’t believe it. I do now. You will give it up, won’t y
ou? We can make a life together, the three of us—me, you, Zoya. We don’t need to set things straight. Life is too short.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin tells her, but she can see from his expression that she has made some headway.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Pravdin repeats to Mother Russia over a breakfast of rice-cake cereal and steaming glasses of tea sweetened with spoonfuls of jam.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Zoya scolds, wagging a wrinkled finger under his nose. “Your life is one big maybe yes, maybe no. You’ve done everything you could. What, for God’s sake, did you hope to accomplish by slugging Frolov in front of everyone at the Bolshoi?”
“I thought they would have to arrest me and the truth would come out at the trial,” Pravdin explains lamely.
Zoya is almost hysterical. “Trial! Who said anything about a trial! Where is it written you have to go down with the ship?”
“A little idealism,” Pravdin mimics her, “is good for the digestion, heartburn, headaches, neuritis, neuralgia and sexual potency.”
“Idealism is an ideal,” Zoya fires back, “not a formula for everyday survival.” She softens, touches his arm. “Dear Robespierre, you have been a real hero in a nonheroic epoch. You have lived up to the promise of your fingernails. But there’s no use beating your head against a wall.” She gestures with her fly swatter to indicate that the walls have ears. “Tell them where you hid the originals and it will be the end of it. Go ahead, tell the walls where the manuscripts are.”
“Power to the powerful, power to the powerful, waak, waak,” comes from the partly open door of Mother Russia’s room.
Pravdin laughs wickedly, turns toward the wall, opens his mouth to speak, shuts it as Ophelia Long Legs bursts into the kitchen gasping for breath from having taken the steps two at a time. “The militia which came yesterday—”
“Calm down, child,” Zoya orders. “You’d think it was the end of the world.”
“At the end of the world,” Pravdin quips, “go to America—everything happens fifty years earlier there.”
Ophelia takes three or four deep breaths, starts again. “The militia came back and left this in the postbox. It’s for Comrade Eisenhower. Here.” She holds out the brown envelope to Pravdin.
He takes it, opens the flap with a kitchen knife, reads, rereads, passes it without a word to Mother Russia. Nadezhda reads it over her shoulder. “What does this mean?” demands Zoya.
“What this means,” Pravdin explains coldly, directing his words toward the wall, “is that I am obliged to move out of Moscow within seven days. My residence permit is what the bosses have canceled.”
“What is this ‘administrative surveillance’?” asks Zoya.
“Is Comrade Eisenhower in trouble or something?” Ophelia looks from one to the other.
“Administrative surveillance,” Pravdin tells Zoya, “means that sunset is what I can’t go out after, public places I can’t put my head into, more than one person at a time I can’t speak to, daily is when I have to report to the KGB.”
Nadezhda scribbles furiously, hands a note to Mother Russia. “He can trade them—the residence permit for the manuscripts!”
“Of course he can,” Zoya seizes the idea eagerly. “This is a negotiating situation.”
Pravdin flings his words at the wall. “Der mentsh iz vos er iz, ober nit vos er iz geven.“
“What language is that, American?” Ophelia Long Legs asks.
“What it is is Esperanto,” Pravdin declares. “It’s an old Talmudic saying I just rediscovered that means, ‘I know what it is I’m selling. And why.’ “
Pravdin buttons his Eisenhower jacket, tightens the laces on his sneakers, starts down the staircase, which creaks agreeably under his feet. Count your blessings, he reassures himself. You’re reasonably healthy, you know what you’re selling and why, and you live in the last wooden house in central Moscow. Touch wood. (His bony knuckles rap on the polished banister.)
He runs into Master Embalmer of the Soviet Union Makusky on the front steps. “Are you still tending the Great Leader, the Living Light?” Pravdin’s nostrils flare; the odor of formaldehyde is unmistakable. “Hal I smell the answer! Attention! The cult of the personality is antisocialist and out of place in a country that prides itself on progress. One step back, no steps forward. The revolution is capable of regretting.”
Master Embalmer Makusky chews on his cuticles, not sure what to make of Pravdin’s outburst. “Those who are not with us—” he begins.
Pravdin finishes the sentence for him. “—will be stashed away in some holy of holies.”
Pigeons scatter. Emaciated squirrels claw their way up trees. An old man sunning himself on a bench angrily waves his cap, but Pravdin, out of earshot, hurtles on across Sokolniki Park oblivious to the small signs seeded around that say:
Comrades: the grass belongs to you, so
KEEP OFF
At Khokhlovka, a district of factories and warehouses, Pravdin can just make out scrawled in faded chalk across a billboard:
Nothing worth knowing can be teached.
He reaches for his chalk, substitutes “preached” for “teached,” adds underneath:
Fear and the pit and the snare are upon thee,
O inhabitant of the earth
(Isaiah: Deutero-Pravdin wonders which Isaiah was the real Isaiah?) Pravdin, chilled to his bones by a cold front that hasn’t yet reached Moscow, makes his way to the Druse’s warehouse.
Zosima opens the small rear door before he has a chance to ring.
“Marx-Engels-Lenin-Organizers-of-Revolution is whom I want to see.”
“There is no Melor,” says Zosima. “He is a figment of your imagination.”
“The Druse then,” Pravdin insists. “Is Chuvash also a figment?”
“Chuvash has been summoned,” she explains, avoiding his eye the way one avoids looking at a condemned man, “to the city of Ashkhabad.”
“What is he selling?” Pravdin sneers. “And why?”
“Services,” Zosima replies as if the answer is as plain as the comfortingly long lifeline on Pravdin’s enormous palm. “To open again to the faithful the door of mercy, to conquer Mecca and Jerusalem, to convince the world of the inevitability of the Faith, to demand obedience to the seven commands of Hamza, the first and greatest of which requires truth in words—”
“And so forth and so on,” groans Pravdin. The door clicks shut in his face and he is left staring into a peephole in which he has been reduced to the only occupant of a teardrop world.
At every intersection uniformed militiamen and auxiliaries with red armbands give Pravdin a casual once-over, but it isn’t until he is within sight of the Kremlin walls that he comes across a serious control point.
“Papers,” barks a beefy major.
Pravdin produces from a hip pocket his internal passport. The major scrutinizes it meticulously, compares with narrowed eyes the photograph against the original standing, appropriately deferential, before him, studies with suspicion the signature, glances at the word “Jew” penned in alongside entry three, takes in Pravdin’s Eisenhower jacket, his basketball sneakers. Expressionless, the major snaps shut the passport, hands it back, indicates with a toss of his head that Pravdin is to continue on his way.
“Mother Russia is certified,” Pravdin berates himself under his breath as he hurries off, “but I’m the one who is out of his mind.”
“Were you addressing me, comrade?” the major calls after him.
“I was mulling over some lines from one of Lenin’s articles,” Pravdin explains. “You know the one; it’s called, ‘I know what is to be done.’ “
Automobile traffic thins, pedestrian traffic swells: delegations from factories, collective farms, schools, hospitals, drift toward Gorky Street to take their places on line for the great pass-in-review that will last seven hours. There is a good deal of tension in the air, an electrical charge that follows a thunderstorm. Police whistles hoot nervously, uniformed arms ge
sture excitedly, the flow is directed between freshly repainted yellow lines. Three men in black suits struggle with an enormous wreath across which is strung a banner that reads: “Lenin is the light.” Little girls with pigtails scamper around their heels, squealing at a game of tag. Half a dozen young men in blue sweatsuits trot by carrying aloft a poster that says, “Vladivostok Institute for Applied Science” and another that proclaims: “All Power to the Soviets.”
“Papers,” orders a crew-cut man with fat thighs in a tight civilian suit at the entrance to Red Square.
“Pravdin, Robespierre Isayevich,” Pravdin announces, holding out his internal passport, “at your beck and call.” He silently clicks the heels of his sneakers, half bows. “I am invited to the reviewing stand set aside for Heroes of the Soviet Union,” he explains, pointing to one of the four medals dangling on the breast of his Eisenhower jacket.
Beyond the civilian, just inside the entrance to the square, the brass Army band strikes up the “Internationale” as it sets off in lockstep toward the reviewing stand. Instantly hats are whisked off heads, knees stiffen, chins jut forward, eyes glaze over, minds wander,
“Entrance during May Day,” the crew-cut civilian shouts over the music, “is by written pass only.”
Pravdin promptly flashes a laminated card, mumbles something about representing the Second Chief Directorate of GLUBFLOT. The civilian catches his wrist in an iron grip before he can put the card away, draws it closer for a better look.
“This is a menu from an ice-cream parlor,” he snaps. His eyes narrow; his voice takes on an ominous tone. “What did you say your name was?”
In the square the “Internationale” ends. Throaty cheers rise like balloons and hang for a moment over the cobblestones. A gleaming convertible with a pot-bellied marshal of the Army anchored erect in the back makes its way down an endless line of soldiers. From behind Lenin’s Tomb a thousand white pigeons soar with an audible flutter of wings into the still sky.