‘Go on!’ I said. ‘I’ve lost her anyway. I’d rather it was you who laid her next instead of an Eskimo or some Uzbek pimp.’
I turned my back and made for the stairs. There was dancing on one of the lower floors. My last words to Stulpanc had been entirely sincere. Through a glass door I could see the outlines of couples dancing. Now and again I thought of Lida walking alone across Moscow. It’s cold outside, I thought, as I got to the Russian-nationalist floor. It’s pitch black out there and the streets are full of Tatars . . . And now you’re writing ballads!
On the fourth floor I fell in with the disenchanted, who were whispering to each other as they paced up and down, two by two. Maybe it was the narrowness of the corridor that made them seem taller than they were in the Institute’s lecture theatres. But maybe the disenchanted always seem taller than they are . . . Fragments of scenes and synopses, spoken in more or less muffled tones, reached my ears, sometimes the left, at others the right. Themes ranged from limping party secretaries who stole piglets from the collective farm, fake ministers, decrepit and dim-witted generals, and Politburo members who spied on each other and buried a proportion of their pay under izba floors against a rainy day. Some stories portrayed top officials’ luxurious dachas, their drinking parties and bribes, and their offspring dancing in the nude. Others dealt with uprisings, if not with real insurrections in various parts of the country; they spoke of hushed-up massacres, the growth of religious sects, deportation, prisons and crimes, the monstrous difference in pay between workers, the supposed ‘masters of the land’, and the leading cadres of the Party and state, ‘the people’s servants’. ‘A Hundred to One is the title of my play,’ said a voice. ‘Maybe you think I’m telling a story about a Soviet soldier fighting off a hundred Germans, a revolutionary overcoming a hundred Tsarists, or a Korean versus a hundred Americans. No, my sweet, there’s nothing of the sort in my play. A hundred to one means that the salary of one character is a hundred times higher than that of another, and what’s most amazing about it is that they’re both positive characters!’
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ said his interlocutor.
‘Yes, yes, my play ends just like that, with a laugh,’ the playwright replied. ‘My low-paid character starts giggling, ha-ha-ha! The whole company bursts out laughing, ha-haha!, and the laughter spreads to the audience and from the audience it ignites the whole wintry city. And then all that’s left for Piotr Ivanovich is a wee stretch of time in our cosy little prison at Butyrky!’
‘Ha-ha!’ said the other.
‘Yuri Goncharov!’ someone said. In the blink of an eye, the novels, plays and poems metamorphosed. The tall, sturdy Party Secretary gives his jacket to a comrade feeling the cold; the Party committee delegate, seen in Act I of version A distilling vodka illegally, now forgets to draw his pay, forgets even to have dinner because he is so absorbed by world revolution; insurrections are transformed into art fairs on collective farms, massacres recast as prize-giving ceremonies; youngsters who danced naked in dachas now volunteer to upturn the virgin soil. Whereupon the disenchanted all began to throw up . . .
I turned and plunged blindly into the other part of the corridor where the women lived. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. Outside one door I thought I recognised the ‘Belarusian Virgins’, and a little further on, the haughty expression and eternal cigarette of their antithesis, Bella Akhmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s wife. She was in her fourth year. With a complexion that was milk-white, despite her Tatar ancestry and good health, she exuded impending maternity, which she never mentioned in her poetry. Each time I met her on the stairs, I could not help thinking of the efforts she must have made to be dressed always at the height of fashion.
‘Bon akşam, Bella,’ I muttered, through my teeth.
‘. . . akşam,’ she breathed, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.
Nobody knew who had invented this half-French, half-Turkish ‘good evening’, but almost everyone had adopted it. Akşam, I repeated inwardly without ceasing to gaze at Bella’s pale face, sadness rippling across it, like waves on a pond. Melancholy clung to the mascara on her eyelashes and spread over the Saharan expanse of the shimmering, moon-like powder on her neck. Akşam, I thought. What a majestic word! This evening is truly an akşam. It’s not an Abend or a soir or a Beчep, but an akşam. Let akşam reign on the frozen steppes of Russia, on the phone lines of the night shift, in the cities and collective farms, over the memories of the civil war, over snow, guns and the soviets of the sixteen republics. Akşam be upon the vastest state in the world!
That was when I saw our professor of art history. She was standing at the very end of the corridor, almost glued to the wall, and her eyes were trained on me.
‘I’m still waiting,’ said the icon, barely audible.
I stopped in my tracks and glared at my boots.
‘You promised me a plot,’ the wall-bound voice went on. ‘A plot with death in it.’
I moved a step nearer. Her face was close to mine now. She had pale skin and unhealthy pink blotches on both cheeks. ‘With death in it,’ I repeated, as if I had heard my own sentence read out. I leaned even nearer and, very gently, not even putting my hand on her unflinching shoulders, I kissed her on the lips. Then I drew my head back in the same measured way, as if expecting the human mural to crumble and bury me in its rubble. I took a few steps backwards. Then, without a pause, I turned on my heels and ran down the corridor.
‘Oh, those bloody Chinese!’ I heard someone say, as he peered through the keyhole of Ping’s door. ‘Come on, Hundred Flower Bloom, or Hundred Nettles, whatever your name is! You there, you inside, open up! I’ve got something to tell you . . .’ Not a sound came from within.
‘Ladonshchikov is a turd!’ another voice wailed, but I didn’t turn to see whose it was. I ran up the stairs four by four and was gasping for breath by the time I got to the sixth floor. The first person I fell upon was Taburokov. With his wispy black hair rising from his sweaty scalp, like fumes from the flame of a gas hob, he came towards me like an apparition in blue. ‘Nkell gox avahl uhr,’ he said threateningly, but I evaded him and went past.
‘A Mongolian has jumped out of a window on the fifth floor,’ someone said. ‘Call Emergency!’
Despite the dim lighting there was muffled excitement along the corridor. Denaturalised writers were coming and going in disarray amid suppressed quarrelling. Now and again dull thuds could be heard. Boom! Boom! That must have been Abdullakhanov banging his head against the wall, as he usually did after more than two hours’ drinking. Nearby I heard mumbling: ‘Hran, xingeth frull ckellfirau hie.’ It came from the Karakums, advancing in a squad from the depths of the corridor. They were speaking their own half-dead language and their words whistled past me, like a sandstorm desiccated by the desert sun. ‘Auhr, auhr, nkr ub . . .’ I wanted to get out, to get away from the dust that was already grating on my teeth and coating me with its namelessness. I fell, my friends, I fell, krauhl ah rk meit! On the other side of the bridge at Mecca . . . Fortunately I found myself at the opening of the unlit corridor that led on my right towards the empty suite, and I plunged into it. As I went along it in a state of bewilderment I heard a noise that sounded like the rustling of reeds against a gurgle of water. I thought my feet were sinking into mud, my legs were unsteady, I was about to be swallowed by soggy tundra. Kyuzengesh had sprung up beside me. ‘Bon akşam,’ I whispered.
‘Jounalla hanelle avuksi,’ he replied.
I’d never heard the sound of his voice before. As he carried on speaking I tried to hang on to the wall so that I didn’t sink into the mud. Although he had always seemed placid and slightly bemused, he was now talking harshly, if still at low volume. His anger was easier to see than to hear. You could read the fury in his crooked teeth – they looked like whitish blobs emitting words of death, or small tombstones half buried in a muddy pit. I turned my back on him and found myself once again in the sixth-floor corridor where the denaturalised group was now thorough
ly mixed up and speaking all its dead and dying languages simultaneously. It was a dreadful nightmare. Their greasy faces distorted by drink and sweat, and streaked with dried tears, they were hoarsely espousing the languages they had rejected, beating their breasts, sobbing and swearing they would never forget them, they would speak them in their dreams; they were castigating themselves for having abandoned their languages, their mother tongues, for having left them at home to the mercy of mountains or deserts so they could take up with that hag of a stepmother, Russian.
I was struck dumb. I’d never imagined I would witness repentance on such a grand scale. ‘Meilla ubr,’ I said, I’ve no idea why.
They wittered on. In the word soup of already dead and gravely sick languages, a few Russian expressions floated to the surface. They cropped up like lost islands in the dark ocean of a collective subconscious. ‘I can see my language before me, like a ghost!’ one kept screaming, as if he had just woken up in fright. Frulldjek, frulldjek hain. Ikunlukut uha olalla. Fuck off. Ah onc kllxg buhu. Meit aham, without a horse or so much as a farewell. This autumn, tuuli lakamata. O star! Vulldiz, et, hakr bil, O my language!
You won’t be able to say I did it! Oh, stop dangling your blood-stained suffixes over me!
Stop! I thought. I stuffed my fingers into my ears, struggled to make my way through the group and eventually got to my room. I flung myself straight on to my bed without taking my hands from my ears. What kind of country is this? And why am I in it? I couldn’t think further than that. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. My chest went into a kind of convulsion once or twice, but it was a dry sob.
* After the end of the Second World War, Communist partisans engaged in armed struggle for the control of Greece. They were finally defeated in September 1949 at a battle in the Grammos region.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Doctor, Doctor, help me! I’m feeling very bad . . . Ah! Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago . . . The bastard!’
What’s happening? I wondered, in my sleep, as I snuggled deeper under my blankets. Who’s calling for a doctor and how did he get into my room? My mind was still befuddled from the previous night and I wasn’t up to understanding anything much. Someone was feeling ill, doubtless because of last night’s drunken binge. Maybe it was Stulpanc, or one of the Karakums, asking for a doctor to help. To hell with them! I thought. I’m not a doctor and they’ve no reason to yell at me through the keyhole like that. I stuffed a loose corner of blanket into my ear and tried to get back to sleep, but it didn’t work. Someone went on calling for help, moaning and uttering indirect threats. You really should go to hell, I thought. You drank like a fish all night, and now you want help? I stuffed my head between the pillows and tried to go to sleep but I could feel the voice calling me, obstinately and evenly. What makes him think I’m a doctor? I wondered in my half-awake state. ‘Doctor, Doctor!’ Enough! After a night like that, I could really do without this! I threw off my bedclothes and listened hard. It was a strange voice, which took a couple of seconds to shake itself free of the aural fog that had shrouded it in my half-conscious mind. It emerged different – unadorned, firm, inhuman: ‘. . . the bourgeoisie’s nefarious aims, this infamous anti-Soviet work. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is the expression of . . .’
Only then did I realise I had forgotten to switch off my radio when I’d gone to bed. I tried to raise myself to hear it better but my head was still too leaden. The announcer was going on angrily about some novel about a doctor. Dr Zhivago, Dr Zhivago . . . Where had I seen or heard that name before? Oh, yes! In the empty apartment, of course: still-life with sardine tin and typescript. The announcer was probably fulminating against that very script. At first I felt like laughing: a typescript and an empty vodka bottle! Were they really worth air time on Radio Moscow so early in the morning?
‘. . . a provocative and odious action of the international bourgeoisie. The award of the Nobel Prize to this reactionary novel . . .’
I whistled. This was serious. A novel called Doctor Zhivago had bagged the Nobel. It had to be a bad novel. A very bad one! Appalling, even!
I held my neck stiff, as if it had been screwed to the pillow, to listen to the rest of the broadcast. It was a gloomy morning. A greyish light strained to get through the double-glazed windows and barely allowed me to make out what was in the room. It was grey and drab, save for the dimly lit rectangle of the radio, whence emanated words that were just as sombre and sticky: ‘. . . the peoples of the Soviet Union . . . indignant . . . libellous . . . scurrilous . . . This counter-revolutionary novel . . . our magnificent Soviet reality . . . dragged through the mud . . .’
Could those typed pages beside the bottle and empty tin really contain all those abominations? I’d held them in my hand without suspecting a thing. But who had written them? I thought I’d heard the name Boris Pasternak. I put out an ear. Yes, that was it. Now his name was being repeated every three to four seconds. How odd. I’d seen Pasternak less than two months previously on a walk in the woods around Peredelkino. We’d left the village and Maskiavicius had pointed out Pasternak’s dacha to me. It was a large two-storey cottage with big bay windows on the ground floor. ‘Look, there he is!’ Maskiavicius had said, a few moments later, pointing to the grounds of the villa. I’d gone up to the fence. At ‘heart-pouring’ times I’d often heard his name mentioned – with admiration from some, but hatred from others – and I was curious to see him, a few feet away from me, digging the garden outside his dacha. He was wearing a very plain cap and boots and, with his strong jaw, he looked like the vice-president of a collective farm.
‘Assuming the role of an agent of the international bourgeoisie, Boris Pasternak . . .’
A Nobel Prize didn’t seem compatible in my eyes with the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he’d obviously bought from the store at the nearest kolkhoz . . .
I got up, dressed, and went into the corridor. In the half-light I could see people dotted around, but they were almost unrecognisable with their swollen eyes, and they seemed to find it hard to recognise anyone else. It was half past eight and most of the residents were still asleep. I was tempted to go back to the empty suite to have another look at that accursed typescript, but I thought better of it straight away. Why should I get into an extra tangle with the KGB now that I was sure Auntie Katya had been ordered to demand the papers of anyone visiting me? The communal bathrooms where we washed every morning were deserted. The cleaners had dealt with the vomit, and not a trace of it remained: everything was clean and cold. I took a look at myself in the mirror. I had big bags under my eyes, my right eye was swollen, as if I’d broken a blood vessel, and my complexion was earthen. If Lida had seen me she would have believed I really was dead! Immediately I felt a needle stuck into my heart: Lida in the lift . . . Trajan’s column . . . her telephone number handed over to Stulpanc . . . What a fool! I said to myself. I must be the king of cretins to do that!
As I was crossing Pushkin Square on my way to the Institute, I noticed that people queuing for tickets at the Central Cinema were deeply absorbed in their newspapers. That must mean the press has started its campaign, I thought.
The wind was cold, with something blind and unforgiving about it. I crossed Gorky Street at the junction, went into the pharmacy on the other side and bought some aspirin, then hurried on – I didn’t want to be late for my lecture.
The professor had just come into the lecture hall. I pushed the door open very quietly, and when I entered, I noticed the room was almost empty. It was very dark and I wondered why nobody had put the lights on. Was there a power cut? I could make out two shapes near the windows and a third in a corner; maybe it was Shogentsukov.
The lecturer looked at his watch, brought his wrist closer to his eyes to make out the time, then looked around as if to ask, ‘What’s going on?’ Half out of his briefcase, I saw a morning paper with Pasternak’s name on the front page.
I soon recognised one of the shapes near the window: it was Antaeus. The other one, in the corner, was
indeed Shogentsukov. He never missed the first lecture of the day: it was a habit, as he said, that he’d adopted when he was prime minister and held meetings with his cabinet at seven in the morning. Now he was hunkered down in the corner as if he had turned to stone.
The door swung open and the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ made their entrance, with Yuri Goncharov behind them. They were all holding a copy of Literaturnaya gazeta, the organ of the Writers’ Union. Then, on the threshold of the lecture hall, the plump, solemn and drab figure of Ladonshchikov appeared.
‘Morning, comrades,’ he said, in a peculiar voice that seemed to combine a sigh and a threat, concern for the common cause and mournful meditation, executive emotion and the gnashing of teeth.
As they came in each one flicked the light switch and, after looking either at the ceiling fixture or at the lectern, mumbled something about there being no power. Ladonshchikov did likewise, then slumped into his seat and opened his newspaper. ‘Vot podlets! What a scoundrel!’ he barked, after a while. His face and the unfolded newspaper then engaged in a curious mirror-dance: his eyebrows moved in lock-step with the headlines, his lips responded and his teeth ground in harmony with the printed words.
The lecturer had begun. It was already half past nine but the hall was still in deep twilight. Daylight from the windows cast illumination only as far down as the print of a Repin picture hanging on the wall opposite me. I’d never even read the caption on the painting, which showed a few wooden faces belonging to high officials or to the editorial board of a journal that would never appear, or perhaps they were a military high command that had never gone to war and never would. Any time you were feeling depressed, that picture made your mood even darker.
‘What happened to you?’ Antaeus asked me, in the break. ‘What’s that graze on your forehead?’
I put my hand to my head and discovered that it was a bit sore. ‘I don’t know!’