Denouncer (15 page)

At first, the authorities in Moscow attributed his bad behavior to the need to clean out the Ryazan swamp of favoritism and nepotism. When state funds mysteriously began to vanish, his Kremlin apologists cited the expense of road building and apartment construction, both of which Lukashenko engaged in energetically. He wanted people to see his accomplishments and celebrate them. Then followed a series of mistresses who never failed to appear in public dressed in anything less than Paris fashions and sporting some conspicuous jewel, on a necklace or ring or pin. His confiscation of the top floor of an apartment building for his private penthouse and den of seduction (where aides brought teenage girls to be raped by the great man), he justified as standard practice for the directors of the secret police and commissars. No violation of decency was too great. He fashioned himself a man of iron in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin.

Although Lukashenko’s critics disappeared into jails and camps, Viktor Harkov remained. Ryazans, like most Russians, live and breathe conspiracies; hence Viktor’s special status escaped neither their notice nor their theories, which included his brother Alexander Harkov served in the military police; Viktor was secretly in the employ of Lukashenko as proof that the mayor guaranteed free speech, even when it was critical of him; Viktor was in possession of secret documents that, if made public, would ruin Lukashenko; the OGPU, for some reason, had a special interest in protecting Viktor.

Petr himself had been undecided about which theory he favored until a man in an overcoat, with a scarf partially covering his face, arrived without warning in Viktor’s flat and disappeared into the back room. Taking the hint, Petr immediately left. Stationing himself in the lobby of a building across the street, he waited for the man to exit and drive off in his black car. Only then did he return to the upstairs flat, where an abashed Viktor said:

“You probably guessed.”

“They all dress the same, and divert their eyes in the same way. When I saw the black Zim at the curb, I knew for sure.”

“In Moscow, I’m told, they drive Packards.”

“If you want me to find other quarters, I’ll understand.”

“No, we need you. As a matter of fact, you were part of the discussion. In your capacity as a military policeman . . .”

“A deserter . . .”

“You accompanied my brother to the Parsky farm.”

“I quit the truck before the killings occurred.”

“Your desertion before the crime looks inexplicably suspicious.”

The more wine Petr consumed, the more he disclosed. An orange glow from the fire inflamed his face and colored his anguish. Sasha imagined himself listening to St. Peter after his experience on the road to Damascus. Similarly, Petr was given a choice. Like Saul, he could serve the government and pursue the enemy, or he could listen to another voice.

Petr explained that according to Viktor, the OGPU remove their own kind, preferably with poison or a bullet, when they prove an embarrassment to the government. Lukashenko had exceeded that point. But the OGPU’s hand could not be apparent in the assassination. An outsider, a hired gun, so to speak, had to arrange the details. In this case, it was decided that a land mine would be the best means to end the mayor’s term of office. Lukashenko had ordered his lackeys to award him a medal for service to the oblast. The ceremony was to take place at the Ryazan Kremlin on the winter solstice. Outside the fortress, a ten-foot-high celebratory arbor of ferns would force Lukashenko’s car to stop. The mayor would exit and acknowledge the display. A land mine planted at that point in the road would be detonated. The OGPU would provide the explosive and the equipment needed to set it off remotely.

“I had told Viktor, foolishly I now see, that the army had given me advanced training in the manufacture and detonation of mines. He wants me to return to Ryazan for what he calls the ‘Fortress Plot’ and hook up the explosive.”

“Will you?” asked Sasha, who valued Petr’s honesty and liked his gentle manner, which Sasha knew that Alya loved.

“I am being promised a full pardon, with my record cleared of desertion, and free transport to Kiev.”

“Who will actually pull the trigger, so to speak?”

“Viktor. I am to be given the clothes of a construction road worker so I can plant the land mine and set the timer. By the time the mine goes off, I’ll be in Kiev.”

“When do you leave here . . . for the plot?”

“I’m expected in Ryazan by December 18.”

“And what if the land mine fails to explode?”

“Oh, it’ll work. Then, no more Lukashenko. A present to the people of Ryazan.”

9

A
fter spending the morning observing Pavel Glinski’s class in world history and listening to him explain to a skeptical student that the North Pole was not discovered by the Russian Otto Schmidt, as the official Soviet line insisted, but rather by the American Rear Admiral Robert E. Peary, a civil engineer, Sasha spent the lunch hour with Pavel discussing the inadequacy of Russian textbooks.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘bias,’” said Pavel, “but omissions make my task all the more difficult. It wo
uld be one thing if the textbooks acknowledged other points of view, but in ours, we receive only the Bolshevik side of things.”

“As you know, you have my full support to ‘fill in the blanks.’”

Pavel stirred some sour cream into his steaming beet soup and sipped it slowly. The table had cold cuts and cheeses and a bowl with hard-boiled eggs. A loaf of black bread had been baked that same morning. Although Sasha had tried to dissuade teachers from taking a nip at lunch, a bottle of vodka stood within reach. Pavel never touched it, though he was known to be a tippler. He took a piece of brown bread, peeled and salted an egg, and remarked casually, almost apologetically, that he’d heard about Sasha having been denounced.

“We’ve come to a pass in this country,” Pavel observed sadly, “where a man—or a woman—will denounce another for making eye contact. Suddenly, the evil eye has become a favorite complaint.”

Sasha reached for an egg and stacked the shells like Chick-Chick, in the shape of a letter S. Pavel stared, as if expecting some magical effect to issue from the placement of the shells. But nothing unusual occurred.

“Do your students ever ask about Trotsky and his role in the revolution? As we all know, the subject is poison, and especially so for someone in my position, director of a school.”

Holding up his hands, in a posture of surrender, Pavel replied, “Everyone—students and teachers alike—observe the unwritten but sacred rule that Trotsky is a disappeared person, never to be mentioned or even alluded to.”

Sasha shook his head and said nothing. He reminded himself that Filatov wanted a report bearing on Brodsky. Galina had left the school office early. This afternoon was as good as any to call on the erstwhile director. Besides, he owed him a visit, having read Radek’s essays. After his dessert of figs and yogurt, he would return to the farmhouse, remove the controversial book from his stewing pot, and set out for Brodsky’s cottage. As a parting comment to Pavel, Sasha said, “If I can find less ‘biased’ textbooks—my word, not yours—I’ll try to include them in your curriculum.”

With the country now in winter, Sasha pulled up his fur collar, pulled down the ear flaps on his
ushanka
, and trudged home. Opening the door, he smelled a delicious odor. Petr was cooking a stew—in the very pot that Sasha used to hide Radek’s book. Looking around and failing to see it, he stifled his fear and asked Petr casually, “Where’s the book I stashed in the pot?”

Unruffled, Petr stirred the stew and replied, “I put it on the kitchen table, and Galina picked it up.” He then ladled a spoonful of stew into his mouth and casually remarked, “Needs more spice.”

Sasha knocked on Galina’s door.

In a distracted voice, she asked, “Who is it?”

“May I come in? You have a book of mine that I need.”

She opened the door and handed him Radek’s collection. Perhaps because of the rupture between them, she stared at the floor. “You do know,” she said, “that Radek’s early essays are on the prohibited list?” Before he could respond, she added, “The bookplate says Avram Brodsky. For a man sentenced to internal exile, he’s running quite a risk. And frankly so are you.” She paused. “I thought you had no interest in politics.” Lifting her gaze, she smiled wanly. “But if you are, I’m glad to see you reading the Left Opposition and not the Right, and especially not the Stalinists.”

Over her shoulder, he could see into her bedroom. The door was ajar. He noticed that her bed, which she always made before leaving for work in the morning, was in disarray. His mind rapidly calculated. Alya had gone off to her tutor. Galina had quit work before lunch. Petr seemed unusually buoyant stirring the stew. The facts were few, but they all pointed in one direction: that husband and wife had engaged in a stew of their own. Sasha’s first reaction was jealousy, but at once he reminded himself that the couple
was
married. Had he liked Petr less and Galina more, he would have felt betrayed. Without envy or anger, he pointed past her and said, “You forgot to make the bed.”

He tucked the book under his coat and crunched through the light snow toward Brodsky’s cottage. From a distance he could see smoke issuing from the chimney, and a minute later, he could smell the sweet scent of birch and maple, both of which, no doubt, were crackling in the fireplace. A single rap brought Avram to the door. Inside, Sasha immediately handed him the book, wishing to be rid of it. After stuffing his gloves in a pocket, he hung his coat and hat on a peg next to the door, and stomped on a mat to dislodge the snow from his felt boots. Then he followed Brodsky to a chair in front of the fire, rubbing his hands and gladly accepting Brodsky’s offer of a shot of vodka, which he downed in the Russian manner, with one swallow.

“Well?” asked Brodsky. “What did you think?”

“I knew Radek’s general view from the work I did on my history thesis. A Trotskyite.”

“But not now.”

“So I gather.”

“He’s helping write the new constitution,” said Brodsky, adding mordantly, “A lot of good that will do.”

“His help or the document itself?”

“The 1924 constitution provided liberties that this new draft will no doubt omit. Just wait.”

An uncomfortable silence settled between the two men. Who would talk first? Brodsky was either trying to draw out Sasha or had carelessly stated his own view of current affairs. In either case, Sasha kept telling himself, “Keep your own counsel.”

“Mark my words,” continued Brodsky, “this new document is Stalin’s constitution, not the people’s.”

Still Sasha said nothing.

“We were freer in 1924 than we are now,” Brodsky added. “Don’t you agree?”

Unwilling to take the bait, Sasha tried a diversionary tactic. He asked a question.

“You’re asking me,” said Brodsky, “what I did before I took over the directorship of the school? I thought you knew. Didn’t the major tell you?”

Actually, Sasha did know, but feigned ignorance.

Brodsky went on to explain how his family had owned a chicken farm, and how he spent a great deal of his youth collecting eggs, cleaning them by hand with a rag dipped in a solution of vinegar, weighing them, and separating the white from the brown and the larger from the smaller for market distribution. He said that the chickens his family put on their own table were first ritually killed by a
shochet
, a rabbi of sorts, and that memories of those days drove him to excel at his studies to escape the life of a farmer. In his spare time, after classes, he liked to write. A kind teacher urged him to send one of his stories to a magazine. It was published, and the editor encouraged him to write a play. That experience led him at university to study literature and to write for the school theater. By the time he graduated, commissions had come his way from Soviet state radio for fifteen- or thirty-minute plays.

Now that Sasha had Brodsky reminiscing, he wanted him to continue. A few well-selected memories are the equal of a thousand photographs. The more he learned about Brodsky, the more selective he could be in his report to Filatov—and the safer. He hoped, therefore, that Brodsky would avoid self-incriminating statements and his year in Kolyma. To keep him away from politics, Sasha prompted him to talk about radio plays.

“My director—every writer was assigned one—behaved like a decent fellow. He treated the actors well, and he didn’t demand too many script changes. The only thing that raised his hackles was tardiness. If an actor arrived late for rehearsals or taping, he would threaten to discharge the person and bring on another.”

“Did you write science fiction, realism, fantasy, children’s stories, fairy tales, what?”

Normally, Brodsky could talk and smoke at the same time, exhaling plumes from both nose and mouth. But Sasha observed that the more animated Brodsky became, the less inclined he was to light up. Before Sasha had posed his last question, Avram had reached for a cigarette, but on hearing the question, he put it down and launched into an aesthetic explanation of writing for radio as sight unseen.

“It relies on imagination, which is richer than any photographic realism. Your own mind sets the stage and pictures the action.”

Avram said that most people prefer realism, with which they can identify. “They prefer feeling to thinking. Nonrepresentational art may work for painters, but not for writers, nor for Stalin. When characters represent ideas, as they did in classical and medieval drama, and fail to express their pain and suffering and confusion and happiness, listeners can’t see themselves in the characters, an identification that most people want. Tearful stories rank higher than ethical dilemmas, unless the latter show the anguish that the characters feel from having to make a Hobson’s choice. Admittedly, the best writers can describe sentiment without crossing the line into sentimentality, but there are more poor writers than good ones. The result: bathos, mawkishness, nostalgia, romanticism, mendacity. Just add music and you have melodrama and soap operas.”

Sasha was well aware of Soviet realism, plays written to please the Vozhd. He remembered one in which poultry farmers lost their animals to diseases, like fowl pox, influenza, infectious bronchitis, and Newcastle’s, until a Soviet veterinarian appeared on the scene and saved the day, that is, the animals.

Eventually, after talking about radio drama and the power of the unseen on the imagination, Brodsky asked whether Sasha had suffered any more denunciations. Having shared his fears at the time with the older man, Sasha appreciated Brodsky’s concern. Avram hazarded that the truth-telling curriculum was probably no better than the Soviet one, and that the students, having been cowed in elementary school, were unlikely to ask embarrassing questions. Pausing to stroke his chin in a reflective attitude, he changed the subject. What did Sasha know about a Goran Youzhny who wanted to take Avram’s picture? And what did he think of the Radek essays? Surely he had an opinion about them.

Equivocation in the Soviet Union had become a national disease, but Sasha had beheaded two men without hesitation. When he thought about this paradox, he shuddered at the bloodthirsty contradiction that ran through his veins. Perhaps he was one of the untold descendants of Genghis Khan. It certainly felt that way to him on occasion, like now. Summoning his courage and suppressing his suspicions, he went straight for Brodsky’s last question.

“Like Radek, I would rather die
for
the country than
against
it. I admit that politics fail to arrest my interest. In Russia, they are either too unsophisticated or too ruthless. If at one time I believed that the best ideas eclipse the poorer ones, I no longer do. But I believe in the country. If at times I may wish to separate myself from it, I cannot. I am a Russian, even when my countrymen behave absurdly and abominably, and all too often barbarously. We live in a country where surgery is performed not with a scalpel but an ax. Radek would probably disagree, believing the Party is all, sick and degraded though it is. Frankly, I do not wish to die for it, as he seems willing to do. But he does recognize that the more the Party kills its critics and detractors, the more it kills itself.”

As Sasha spoke, Brodsky devoured several cigarettes. Now he handed the vodka bottle to Sasha and said, “You are only partially right. Take a drink.” He snuffed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “When you have lived your whole life for the Party, as I have, you accept its judgments, even when those include exile or death.” He paused to exhale a stream of smoke. “Not to accept is to nullify your whole existence.”

Sasha warily noticed that Brodsky had said, “as I have,” not “as I did.” Was he saying, then, that he still supported the Party—after Kolyma, after all the innocent men and women who had frozen or starved to death, and the many yet to die in the future?

With the room growing dark and the embers fading, Brodksy’s cigarette shone like a firefly. For a moment, Sasha imagined Brodsky not as a man but as a floating, bodiless red spot, a distant star, a Cyclopean eye. “The country has about it,” said Avram, “the feel of a snowball gaining momentum and size as it hurtles to the bottom. One falsehood leads to another. Suddenly the Russians believe they have discovered the North Pole, and Darwin’s theory of evolution has been eclipsed by Lysenko’s theory of hybridization. We have already put Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva on the black list. What will come next? Will Marx and Lenin replace Plato and Aristotle in the pantheon of philosophers? Or have they already? How many more people will be expunged from Soviet history and become non-persons? When we finish rewriting history, our textbooks will tell not of continuous human effort but only of Soviet exceptionalism.” He threw back another shot of vodka. “As a teacher I cannot deny the facts. For better or worse, Comrade Sasha, the original snowball, which is now an avalanche, is hurtling toward us. A mountain is threatening to engulf us. Surely, you see that? We have been trained and educated to serve this regime. What else do we have? We are its creatures, its misbegotten children. Don’t you understand what has happened—don’t you see? That’s why you, too, Sasha, must be loyal!”

Brodsky’s appeal brought the discussion to an end. In the darkened room, the loudest sound was the crackling of dying coals. The pause gave Sasha time to think, and he suddenly regretted his outburst, knowing full well the cost in Russia of truth telling; but he also felt relieved. Brodsky said nothing.

✷

On his way back to the farmhouse, Sasha stopped at his office. Turning on the hall light, he saw immediately on the bulletin board the large poster: “Trotsky Lives!” How many others had seen it? If no one, he was safe. The fat was in the fire if word got around. He removed the poster, folded it in four parts, and pocketed it to study later. Perhaps the handwriting would look familiar, though he doubted having such luck. The poster and the red crayon used to letter it might be traceable. Such supplies were not easily obtained in a country suffering from a shortage of paper and pencils.