The next day Hieronymus Stulpanc and Maskiavicius, our fellow students from the Baltic, turned up, both tipsy; next came the ‘Belarusian Virgins’ (that’s what we called the girls on our course, though only one was from Belarus). The Karakums, as we referred to those from Central Asia, all turned up around midnight, blind drunk, with Taburokov in tow. He’d been flailing about, trying to force his way into the Israeli Embassy because he wanted to have a word – just a word – with the Jewish ambassador to salve his conscience. So the bastard would not be able to claim afterwards that Taburokov hadn’t warned him in time, as his writer’s conscience required him to, and that he’d already changed alphabet three times, yes, he had, and all that that came with, and he didn’t really care anyway, and as a matter of fact he’d be happy to piss in the Jordan, however sacred it was. And that wouldn’t do us any harm either, because we’ve strangled all the Volgas and Olgas in their cradles, along with their alphabets, because we had Cyril and Methodius and the glorious Soviet sandpit and the one and indivisible— Brrr! It’s freezing in here!
Artashez Pogosian, nicknamed ‘The Masses in Their Tens of Millions’ because he identified with them all at the drop of a hat, apparently delighted to have dumped his wife, swept in with the other students from the Caucasus. They were all drunk, except Shogentsukov, who had come on his own on a later train, and turned up looking slightly drained, his face exhibiting what Pogosian jokingly called his post-prime-ministerial melancholy.
That same day saw the Moldovans come in, as well as the Russians from Siberia and Central Russia, including Yuri Goncharov (nicknamed ‘Yuri Donoschik’ by one of the Shotas, who thought he was a government sneak); then came the Jews, the Tatars and the Ukrainians, the only ones who came by plane. The next day Kyuzengesh arrived in the afternoon, looking quite grey, the last of the group. As was his habit, he shut himself away in his room and did not emerge for forty-eight hours. Stulpanc, who occupied the room next door, said that he always did that when he came back from the tundra because he found it hard to readjust to twenty-four-hour days. It was a serious problem for writers from those parts, Stulpanc went on. Can you imagine living your whole life in six-month-long days and nights, and then being required to divide your time into artificial chunks when you sit down to write? For instance, Kyuzengesh couldn’t write ‘Next morning he left’ because ‘next morning’ for him meant in six months’ time. Or again, when a writer from the tundra set down ‘Night fell’, he was recording something that happened so rarely it would have the same effect as ‘The third Five-year Plan has been launched’ or ‘War has broken out’. ‘Our comrades from the tundra have a problem,’ Stulpanc went on. ‘One night Kyuzengesh said something to me but he spoke so softly I couldn’t understand anything. But he was definitely complaining about all that. I reckon someone ought to look in detail at the time factor in the writing of our friends from the tundra. It’s got real potential, even if it comes close to the kind of modernism people say that French fellow Proust fell into when he made time go round in circles. Socialist realism needs to be studied in its impact on the Arctic plains, don’t you agree?’
‘Stulpanc, you really don’t know what you’re saying,’ Nutfulla Shakenov broke in. ‘You’re trying to tell me about that decadent Procrustes, or whatever his name is, but do you realise that in all the tundra and the taiga put together, in an area of three million square kilometres and then some, there is one, and only one, writer and that’s Kyuzengesh? Do we really need a literary theory just for him?’
We all thought that was ominous and grandiose at the same time. To be lord and master in a space more than six times the size of Europe! To be the tundra’s own grey consciousness!
There were crowds of people in the corridors of Herzen’s old two-storey house and outside it, in the garden with the iron railings and two gates, the main one on Tverskoy Boulevard and the other at the rear giving on to Malaya Bronnaya. Nowhere else in the world could so many dreams of eternal glory be crowded into such a small space. Often, when you looked at all those ordinary faces in profile – some fresh and alert, most of them drawn and unkempt – you might guess that several were already turning into marble or bronze. That became obvious when, around dusk and especially when they were drunk, a one-armed fourth-year student and Nutfulla Shakenov, with his partly destroyed nose, resembled statues dug clumsily out of the ground by an archaeologist.
The corridors were crammed mostly with first-year students. They appeared drunk, and had a euphoric glow, as if they had been pumped full of gamma rays, while their pallor was graced with a layer of perspiration that was as becoming as it was permanent. A boy with sparkling, close-set eyes wove among them – a slim, handsome lad who had come from the Altai mountains. He moved from one group to another, getting into conversation with some, saying whatever flashed into his mind, then taking off to talk to another knot of people. ‘What a splendid pair of trousers!’ he exclaimed to me. ‘Where did you get them?’ His wide eyes became even more entrancing. ‘Where did you find them?’ I told him, curtly, because I was rather cross that he should use familiar forms of language with me when I was his senior. He noticed my irritation, bowed two or three times, his hand on his chest in apology, and said he would henceforth adopt a more formal tone, would speak to me in the third or fourth person, if it existed, but that I should not take offence: he came from the highlands of the Altai where men were more frank and open than they were anywhere else. ‘You, you,’ he kept saying with a smile, because it was the only word of English he knew, and I told him he’d pronounced it as if it was an Albanian word. That was when he twigged I was from Albania, and declared passionately that he would wear only Albanian trousers in future because they were the most stylish in the world. Then he asked if I could give him the pattern, and blurted out that he wanted everything he had to be perfect, that he would write perfect works, that within the next month he would meet the prettiest girl in Moscow and have an affair with her. ‘I am a virgin,’ he went on, in breathless excitement, ‘and, like the Altai mountains with their sublime peaks, I insist on losing my virginity to the most inaccessible girl in the capital!’ He carried on talking with unaltered fervour, but instead of blushing he grew even paler. ‘That is how it is! I have to manage this at any cost, because if I don’t, I don’t know what I will do. How lucky I am to make your acquaintance. Oh! Sorry, to make your acquaintance, sir. I’ll begin with the trousers. A man who hasn’t got the right kind of trousers doesn’t deserve any favours from life. I only like things that are perfect because I’m from the Altai and up there everything is noble, pure and eternal. I can’t have a fling with an ordinary girl. She’ll be either the most beautiful or there’ll be nobody . . .’
‘Well,’ I replied, entertained, ‘it’ll be very hard to get everything, so to speak, up to the same height as the Altai.’
He broke in energetically, ‘No, sir, you’ll never persuade me of that. You’ve got the best trousers in Moscow, so please tell me where I can find the most attractive girl in town!’
I smiled and was about to tell him that he would never find what he was after, even with the help of the KGB, but his eyes latched on to mine, like a cat’s, and he seemed to expect that I was about to tell him the name and address of Sleeping Beauty and maybe her telephone number too.
CHAPTER THREE
To my left, beyond the window’s double panes, snow was falling noiselessly; to my right, in complete contrast, the dark smudge of Nutfulla Shakenov’s rough, tanned chin, was bent low over his notes. Wet snow slithered intermittently over Tverskoy Boulevard, settling on the trees and empty benches. The letters that Nutfulla Shakenov was writing in his notebook were widely spaced, as if he were bewildered. The professor of aesthetics was lecturing on the eternal unity of life and art. Sometimes the snow seemed to settle on his sentences, giving them a melancholic and meandering cast. He was explaining that art goes hand in hand with life from the moment of birth, when the infant is greeted with song, until death, when funer
al music accompanies a man’s last journey to the grave. Drowsy with the heat rising from the radiators, I gazed at the passers-by as they hurried, wrapped up in themselves, along Tverskoy Boulevard and speculated that sometimes art is bound up with the icy snow sweeping people on to Gorky Street, the Garden Ring or the Arbat. It made them put their heads down, hunch their shoulders, and pick tiny grains of ice from their eyelids. ‘Art does not abandon us even after death,’ the lecturer droned on. Even after death, I parroted in my mind. Snow falls on us all even after death, that’s for sure . . . Nutfulla, beside me, carried on writing his misshapen black letters. In the row in front of mine Antaeus, from Greece, was muttering something to Hieronymus Stulpanc. The two Shotas, sitting beside him, looked horrified. ‘And so, for example,’ the lecturer was saying, ‘some people’s tombs are decorated with sculpture, or simply with an epitaph, a few lines of verse. Art accompanies them even in everlasting sleep . . .’ He paused, presumably to measure the effect his words had had, which he must have judged insufficient, since he went on: ‘A month ago I went to the Novodevichy monastery. I visit the cemetery there quite often. It was very autumnal. I stopped at the tomb of A. P. Kern, on which Pushkin’s famous lines are carved:
‘Я помню чудное мrновенье
Пеpедо мной явилacь тьІ . . .
I remember that magical moment
When you appeared before me . . .’
‘Who was A. P. Corn?’ Taburokov asked.
Taken aback, the lecturer turned to face him. His grey hair looked electric with anger. He opened his mouth several times before he could find his words. As if something was missing.
‘You ought to know the answer, Taburokov,’ he said at last. ‘Every schoolboy knows that poem by heart. It’s one of the most beautiful poems in all the world, and everyone knows that it is dedicated to a young lady with whom Pushkin had had an affair.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Taburokov said.
‘Yes, you do, and don’t forget it.’
‘Pff!’ Taburokov scowled. ‘I can’t remember the name of my first wife yet I’m supposed to remember someone called Anna Corn or Kerr or some such nonsense!’
‘Don’t say such things!’ the lecturer screeched, anger making his voice rasp.
The audience, lulled into torpor by the whiteness of the snow outdoors, the warmth of the radiators inside and a general lack of interest in aesthetics, now woke up. Taburokov – he was bald, had a round, fleshy face and bags under his eyes – kept quiet. Stulpanc used to say that he looked like the bad guy in Chinese movies. He had a point. Taburokov’s ashen scalp, with its greenish tinge, which was visible especially at twilight, looked like a guglet brought out of an archaeological dig, as if at night Taburokov fell not into sleep but into a hole in the ground.
It took several minutes for everyone to quieten down again. The lecturer, despite his irritation, returned to the cemetery of the Novodevichy monastery. I’d been there the previous year and his description was accurate, except that I could no longer recall if the russet leaves on the marble tombs were copper inlays or actual autumn leaves. Among the tombstones I’d noticed that of Stalin’s wife, which had these words carved on it: ‘To my beloved Alliluyeva, J. Stalin’.
As the lecturer carried on, silence settled over the room, perhaps because the topic was tombs and everyone was surely thinking about their own or about their verse being carved on the graves of women they had known, who perhaps didn’t deserve the honour, because in most cases the affairs had consisted principally of disappointments and dubious consequences.
The group had now returned to its slumber. But it was of an unusual kind: it had a crack across it and a great howl ran the whole length of the scar. Snow was falling near to me, but it allowed me only brief escapes from the inner scream that was tearing everything to pieces. Nutfulla Shakenov’s glance – olive-tinted, cloudy and blank at the core – almost touched my right eye. Indeed, his impressive eyebrow came within a whisker of sticking to my forehead, like a leech. Someone nearby sighed. ‘Oh!’ Was it Shogentsukov? No, not him. His face expressed some muffled sorrow. Next to him was Hieronymus Stulpanc, his yellow hair as translucent as a watercolour. Out of the corner of my eye I observed Shogentsukov’s gelatinous visage and thought that it was perhaps not disappointment at losing his job (his ex-prime-ministerial pain, dixit Pogosian) that had wrought havoc on his huge head. The wailing that whirled around inside him, hollowing him out, like a drill, must have had some other root. In fact, everybody’s nerves were somewhat on edge, but no gestures expressed an anxiety whose muteness made it all the more fearsome. It had been floating over us for some days. I’d noticed the first symptoms the previous Friday, when Abdullakhanov had said, ‘Brothers, something’s not right! Shto-to nye to!’ For the rest of the afternoon and evening, people had stalked the corridors, bumping into things and cursing doors they seemed not to have noticed.
As for Taburokov . . . I suddenly realised why his question about A. P. Kern had been so incongruous. It was the second time he’d asked something like that. The first was just before the big party at which Maskiavicius had injured himself by walking into the glass panel of the main door, and the two Shotas went up to the attic of the Institute, over the ceiling of the seventh floor, to slug it out undisturbed. Just before this monumental drinking session, which was reported all the way up to the Executive Committee of the Writers’ Union of the USSR, Taburokov, in a class on the psychology of artistic creation, had suddenly asked who Boris Godunov was, because he’d never heard of him before.
The question he asked today was just as bizarre. The first symptoms had appeared on Thursday or earlier, maybe as far back as Tuesday. Gloom had hung over us, a sense of the foreboding and depression that are so well expressed by the heavy sound of the Russian word khandra . . .
At last the lecture ended. Everyone went into the corridor and put on hats and coats, but nobody ventured outside. People were hovering, as if they were caught in fog, not knowing where the door was, and were watching each other for a signal or a message. At long last the signal came. As sharp as a razor blade and as supple as sunshine finding its way through the clouds, the gleaming word ‘ski’ was heard. It was a password, a code shared by all. Tomorrow, Sunday, skiing at Peredelkino. Of course, skiing, s k i ing. A mad glint lit everyone’s eyes. Abdullakhanov’s close-set squinters. Maskavicius’s too. The Shotas’ four eyes casting their converging glances. The omnipresent photographic eyes of Yuri Goncharov. Even Taburokov and the Karakums uttered the word ‘ski’. Aha! Now I guessed what the code was. The plot was unmasked. They said ‘ski’, but they heard ‘vodka’! Well, then, tomorrow, at Peredelkino . . . The conspirators carried on exchanging glances. Kyuzengesh’s eyes were veiled by what looked like a thin layer of ice (the frost had set in some time ago in the tundra). The eyes of Antaeus the Greek. Who then proposed, ‘How about a coffee at the Praga?’
The Praga cafe on the Arbat was the only place in Moscow where you could get proper black coffee. They served it in little brass thimbles, and almost everyone in artistic and literary circles was a regular there. But Antaeus and I went to the Praga to satisfy our yearning for Balkan coffee.
We set off along Tverskoy Boulevard. The mix of rain and snow was oppressive.
‘Seems like tomorrow is set to be a real binge!’
‘So it seems.’
Antaeus and I used to spend a lot of time together. After the defeat of the Greek partisans at the Battle of Grammos,* he’d crossed the border into Albania with some of his comrades and for a time was given medical care in Gjirokastër, my home town. I was then in middle school, and I remember that when I spent nights in the area near the municipal hospital, I used to quake with fear when I heard the moanings of the wounded Greeks. ‘I might even have heard your groans,’ I used to tell Antaeus. He’d been living in Moscow for a while now and spent his time writing; since he’d been sentenced to death in absentia in Greece he had no intention of setting foot in his own la
nd ever again.
‘Tomorrow there’ll be quite a shindig,’ he said, once we were sitting in the café. ‘You remember the last time?’
I nodded, signalling something like, Yes, sure, there’ll be chaos. ‘It’s all because of boredom,’ I said. ‘A kind of collective khandra, don’t you reckon?’
‘It’s affected us as well. We’ve got khandra too,’ he replied. ‘Isn’t that so?’
I didn’t know what to say. Though I had broached the subject I wasn’t keen on his going over it again. I trusted him, we’d told each other a lot of things held to be sensitive and yet, I don’t know why, I’d recently become much less open with him on matters of this kind.
‘Antaeus,’ I said, ‘we’ve known each other for ages, yet I’ve never thought of asking you what your real name is.’
He smiled, turned to gaze through the window at the crowd thronging the steps to the Arbat Metro station, then, without looking at me directly and speaking in a muted voice, as if he was referring to something very far away, he uttered his name. Then he turned to me and asked, ‘You don’t like it, do you?’
I shrugged in a gesture that meant approximately, ‘That’s not the point, but . . .’ To be honest, compared to his nom de guerre, Antaeus, his real name struck me as very plain. It was a perfectly ordinary Greek name with a th sound and several ss in it.
‘I can understand your not liking it,’ he said, as he took off his glasses to wipe the lenses. Like those of any shortsighted person without their glasses, his eyes looked wishy-washy and pale, like his name. ‘You’re not the first person to react in that way to my name. But my pseudonym is a different kettle of fish.’